The event, which defines Latin America’s connectivity strategy for the year ahead, featured dialogue, access to operations and a whole host information about the direction the industry is heading.
While there were many big learning points from this year’s event, here are five key things to take away from Capacity Latam 2020:
Digital transformation and telecommunications in Brazil
Government fiscal responsibility has reduced expectations of uncontrolled debt, which has allowed interest rates to be brought to unprecedentedly low levels. Regulatory relief measures have been adopted to foster regional broadband providers.
Future initiatives include: Connected North and Connected Northeast. Connected North includes backbone deployment in the Amazon region, with an expectation of 4,959 km of fibre optic cable. Connected Northeast includes fibre optic infrastructure activation in the Northeast of 100Gbps, with the coverage reaching 16 cities in addition to 67 cities reachable through partners.
EllaLink’s new route revolution
A diverse geographical route bringing up to 50% latency reduction between Latin America and Europe with direct City-to-City connectivity. EllaLink revealed that in regards to its turnkey construction contract with Alcatel Submarine Networks, its network construction progression is 60%.
The company said that four cable faults are present in the vicinity of the CRS route – all attributed to fishing activity and are around 1,300m WD. EllaLink route has been selected to avoid cable crossing and ensure proper and uninterrupted burial until 1500m WD is reached. Its Sines CLS on 10,000m2 of land is ready to accommodate other CLS.
Paulo Spaccaquerche, President, Brazilian IoT Association round up
IoT is already a reality, as there are already more than 15 billion things or objects connected on the planet. In terms of technology, the different types of devices and sensors can be highlighted, which have the potential to create a large electro-electronic industry in the world; telecommunications networks, including the new data transmission networks - LPWANs; software running on cloud servers, Applications, Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain.
LPWan networks, like Sigfox and LoRa, are growing rapidly in several countries and market segments. In the second half of 2019, 5G was in 32 countries with +50 operators for various devices. There were four chipsets available: Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek and Huawei.
In regards to connectivity in Brazil, there is still a lot of solution that needs to migrate from 2G, according to Spaccaquerche.
Key drivers for growth in the Latam market for 2020
Global telecom investment estimated at $382 billion in 2019 according to the Economic Intelligence Unit. Ariana Batori, Global Broadband Lead / Investment Officer, International Finance Corporation said that the Latin American telecoms sector is attractive overall, but is still significantly unequal between countries.
Content providers are key drivers of international bandwidth growth, and the internet penetration in Latin America is at par with the global average, despite the usage of household broadband being low. She highlighted that operators continue to invest heavily in the deployment of 4G, and 5G is on the horizon in the region, but it is trailing behind the adoption from other countries. Growth in IoT is being driven by smart home and smart building applications, and Latin America is set to represent 5% of global connections by 2025.
Data centre outages
Uptime Institute revealed that its mission requires expanding its vision, because IT now uses many more places of execution. Organisations struggle with service disruptions with different root causes. The Uptime Institute accompanies organisations on their journey to create measurable and resilient digital infrastructure.
Most organisations do not evaluate the delivery of services that cover digital infrastructure; instead, focus on the quality of each discrete component or rely on SLAs as a base, according to the company.
