Institutional Connectivity: The Case of Mexico (English)

Abstract

In the context of the return of the state as a financier of large-scale telecommunications deployment in 2010, the Mexican government initiated an ambitious program to deploy high-quality broadband access in public institutions with federal resources. This article describes the program and analyzes, through a large-scale survey, the state of Internet access and adoption within Mexican hospitals, schools, and local government offices. The results show that the relation between the costs currently expended by the public institutions analyzed and the quality of broadband services received is highly inefficient. Thus, a policy that addresses this problem is necessary. However, such a policy may not only be one of expending public resources, but also one of a negotiation with carriers of a large-scale, high-quality connection to public institutions.