World Internet Day: Lacnic Highlights Internet Growth in the LAC Region
With an Internet penetration rate of 40%, Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the regions that has advanced the most towards breaching the digital divide.
On this World Internet Day, the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean would like to highlight the sustained and steady development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) throughout the region –home to more than 10% of Internet users worldwide– and reaffirm its commitment to working towards a stable, secure, open and participatory Internet.
On this special day, Lacnic stresses that the best way to strengthen and meet the major challenges posed by the Internet is to further the collaborative, interactive and coordinated experiences undertaken by the regional community during all these years.
In the last six months, the number of Internet users in Latin America and the Caribbean increased from 240 million to over 255 million, representing a growth of 6%.
Today, four out of ten Latin Americans have Internet access and this number is expected to grow over the next 30 months until reaching a penetration rate of 60%. This involves a great effort on the part of the organizations working on developing the Information Society.
It is estimated that by 2015 there will be 100 million new Internet users, totaling 355 million Internet users in Latin America and the Caribbean.
During the past year, according to Lacnic records, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Brazil, Chile, and Haiti led the list of countries with the highest Internet growth based on the assignment of IPv6 and IPv4 address blocks and ASNs.
In turn, according to data provided by Lacnic's technical team, Brazil ranked first on the list of countries with the highest number of IPv6 assignments, the new Internet technology, followed by Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile.
Within the region, the country with the most IPv6 traffic is Peru with 1.69% (according to Cisco, overall IPv6 traffic is 1.41%).