Brazil Reaches 150M Mark on Broadband and Still Growing

The Brazilian Telecommunications Association (Telebrasil) released a report stating that Brazil has already exceeded the 150 millions mark in broadband connections as of April 2014. This shows a 51 percent increase compared to the same time last year.

According to the report, there had been 51 million new connections within the last twelve months. The total number of fixed broadband connections reached 23.1 million in April with a total of 2.1 million connections which were activated within the same twelve month period. High speed internet connection among household in urban areas in Brazil has increased 39 percent covering activations over 287 different new municipalities enjoying the perks brought by this technology. At the same time, the mobile connectivity via 3G and 4G networks also skyrocketed to a 63 percent growth rate with 127.2 million connections in April as compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, 4G LTE users have reached 2.5 million with 106 cities all over Brazil. This growth includes 15.7 million data terminals such as Machine-to-machine SIMs and modems deployed and 111.5 million new smartphone users in Brazil, covering more than three thousand municipalities in the country where 91 percent of the population resides.

The growth spurt can be attributed to Brazil's newly enacted tax regulation involving the decrease in fees for Machine-to-machine terminals, devices and services, as well as the emerging internet trends. According to Mary Ann Azevedo, one of Cisco's contributing writer, one of the driving forces in 2012 and 2013 was the growing popularity of social media networking in Brazil. ABI Research confirms the same trend and mobile telecom companies are investing largely on value added 3G and 4G network services for the region.

LeadingQuest and Parlacom Brazil CEO, Clovis Lacerda agrees that internet usage is indeed gaining a lot of popularity in the region. He also believes that consumers and the Brazilian population will soon realize that they can get more benefits from these mobile broadband connections than just online streaming and social networking.

"I believe that as technology advances and as more smart devices, not just smartphones, are already available in the market, consumers, particularly the Latin American population, will realize that they have an upper hand on this, which means, there is more that they can get from these smart devices." Mr. Lacerda said. "And with technology further evolving, various "smart" applications and solutions, including machine-to-machine services that will allow them to connect their devices to other devices." He further affirms.