The findings follow TeleGeography's latest regional overview of the Latin American connectivity market, which shows that demand is strong and continues to rise, largely driven by internet service providers and content providers.
While backbone providers claim a 64% share of used capacity in 2021, demand from content providers has been growing. Nearly 30% of Latam used capacity was claimed by content provider in 2021, with demand increasing from key industry players like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. This has driven in part by these players increasing their capacity to accommodate the demands for data as a result of lockdowns and restrictions in 2020, as well as remote working trends post-pandemic.
“We see that bandwidth demand remains strong across the region,” said Anahí Rebatta, senior analyst at TeleGeography.
“It’s worth noting that 100Gbps wavelength price erosion is outpacing 10Gbps price erosion in nearly all routes. This suggests it will be more cost-effective for customers to upgrade their networks moving forward.”
Rebatta is also participating in Capacity LATAM 2022, giving a presentation on the biggest cloud headlines from the region. The biggest takeaways were that beyond the nine existing cloud regions in service in Latin America, there are a further six planned with Microsoft set to land in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and Oracle investing in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.
“Country to country, discrepancies remain in connectivity and price. Used international bandwidth is soaring ahead of the average Tbps in Brazil. But smaller economies like Ecuador have grown the fastest over the last four years,” added Rebatta.
At the start of the year, TeleGeography reported that the market for international voice traffic is falling drastically, with carriers’ traffic down by 7% in 2020 after three equally bad years.
