Telecommunications Infrastructure
Computing & Internet Diffusion
Analysis: Strengths & Weaknesses
Analysis: Impacts on non-IT business
Analysis Impacts on IT business
Impacts on the non-IT business
As mentioned in the previous analysis section regarding strengths and weaknesses, Argentina is a country where most businesses that would need connection to high speed Internet connectivity or advanced information and technology services and or products would reside in or around Buenos Aires. Its capital is by far its main economic force. Buenos Aires is to Argentina what New York City is to the East Coast of the United States. It is a hub of businesses ranging from financial services to information technology. Therefore, today, with competition open, businesses can enjoy choosing services, which was an option not available a decade ago.
Many ICT related businesses in Argentina, such as ISPs or telecom carriers, have modeled bundled services solutions found in most advanced / developed nations. Therefore, to imagine what it might be like to be a business in Argentina (located in Buenos Aires) one might envision being in Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco, London, or Paris - excluding obvious cultural differences. One could find similar bundled services from communications providers in all of these cities, which is the case in Buenos Aires.
Moreover, there are many qualified IT people residing in Argentina. Therefore, there is no shortage of personnel for one to utilize as support and or consultants for one's business. With a public school system, that focuses on the sciences (including computer science) that is even free at the university level, IT labor supplies are sufficient to meet current and growing industrial demands. In this regard, Argentina has one of the highest university enrollments in the world. Over two million university-graduated professionals reside in Argentina. The publicly educated professional would have been trained studying many of the life sciences, speaking at least two languages (English is the most popular), and with at least five years of college - the normal time to get a B.A.
A problem lies in the outreaches of the city limits, where connectivity to the Internet is not as easy to achieve. In this regard, a growing satellite industry might be able to provide assistance through telecom carriers, although demand for this endeavor as well as capacity issues would need to be further analyzed.
One past concern that seems to have gotten better were phone rates. As was typical in many Latin American countries during the highpoint of Internet expansion worldwide, high phone rates prevented many users in Argentina to connect for long period of times. This is a drastic contrast to consumers in the U.S. who would let this connection run all day at minimal fees. This contrast did not help the small business owner in Argentina get connected early on in the growth of the Internet. Therefore, consumers in Argentina are taking longer to adopt to the Internet as a main retail source / vendor. Buying habits take time to change and Argentina still has not caught on to these trends. This slow moving process goes back to expensive phone rates , which hindered this technological adoption rate. Out of over 37 million people, 2 million users were connected to the Internet by 2001.
