MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Internet becomes a basic service in Chile

The measure applies only to fixed home services, Araya explained

Internet access has become a basic service in Chile just like drinking water, sanitation, and electricity, which renders it eligible for subsidies and other government-sponsored forms of assistance, it was reported from Santiago on Thursday.

These services will now have “a regulation similar to that which telephony has historically had,” Telecommunications Undersecretary Claudio Araya explained in a radio interview. “People will not be denied service when they are within a company's service area,” he added.

The new legislation appearing Thursday in Chile's Official Gazette paves the way for the State to take action and help families afford internet connectivity while new obligations have been set for providers. ”If their network capacity is limited, they have up to six months to expand it (...) if they have to build a new network, they have up to 12 months to do so and they are obliged to provide the service,“ the official pointed out.

He also made it clear that these specifications refer only to fixed internet, ”to protect the user at home.“

Chile's Transport and Telecommunications Minister Juan Carlos Muñoz has underlined that measures of this sort were adopted to ”shorten the digital divide.” The South American country is believed to rank fourth worldwide in terms of average broadband internet speed.