Bahamas, Barbados slowest-growing fixed broadband markets in region
The Bahamas and Barbados were listed as the two slowest-growing markets in the area regarding expanding the selected broadband market. However, the region achieved 50.4 percent residential fixed broadband penetration at the end of 2022.
SP Global, a division of Standard and Poor’s, in its Latin American multichannel, broadband, 5G markets: 2023 outlook, noted that multichannel services would continue on a downward trend, losing 0.56 percent of subscribers across the region (358,121 subscriptions) in 2023, mainly on the back of direct-to-home (DTH) disconnections.
“The fastest-growing markets were Bolivia, with a 10-year CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 26.3 percent to 2022 when the Andean market reached 1.2 million fixed broadband households and penetration of 30.9 percent; followed by Honduras with 494,111 fixed broadband households and 21.7 percent penetration, and Paraguay with 692,880 households subscribed and 35.4 percent penetration,” SP Global said.
“The slowest-growing markets in the region, in particular Barbados and The Bahamas, are countries where market penetration is already higher than the average for the region, while Puerto Rico is experiencing a long-standing economic slump, compounded by hurricanes in 2017 and 2022 that caused severe damage to infrastructure, as well as steady population migration to the continental US.”
The report noted that internet service providers (ISPs) had been increasingly expanding their FTTH (fibre to the home) networks across the region to cope with the demand for fast, reliable internet.
“The region is moving in line with the results of the September 2022 Kagan Global Telco Operator survey, which pointed to operators deploying FTTH to future-proof their networks and address customers’ demand for higher internet bandwidth,” SP Global said.
“The platform most affected by this trend is DSL, the region’s top delivery platform for fixed broadband up until 2016, which shrunk at a 9.0 percent annual rate from 2012 to 2022, from 64.8 percent market participation to 11.3 percent. Our research points to the platform approaching the end of its life in Latin America in the coming years, dropping to about 4.1 percent of the regional market by 2027 as companies, especially former state monopolies across the region, replace the ageing legacy network with fibre.”
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