Internet in Mexico

Background Information

Mexico is one of the most well known Latin American countries. Mexico is located between the United States and Guatemala. As of July 2005 the estimated population was 106,202,903. The literacy rate in Mexico is 92.2%. Mexico has a federal republic government as well as a free market economy. It recently entered the trillion dollar class. It's GDP per capita is $9, 600. Forty percent of the Mexican population lives below poverty. As of 2005, Mexico has approximately 17.1 million users connected to the internet.

The Internet in Mexico

The first people to connect to the Internet in Mexico were academic institutions. The Monterrey campus of El Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) established the first direct connection to the Internet in 1989. Even though the institution had the internet, often times it was slow because they used a connection through Mexico City and it was sometimes interrupted. The country got off to a slow start with their connection to the internet because they did not have all the financial backing that was necessary to efficiently have everyone connected. Through the help of the government and several academic institutions, in 1994, they agreed to finance the first national backbone. This backbone would link the regional academic backbones as well as provide direct connections to the United States.

After 1995, the use of the internet by universities and government agencies in Mexico grew rapidly. By 2000, most of the college students had email addresses and the government agencies had Ethernets. According to CUDI:

In 2001, Mexico joined a consortium of American universities to link to Internet-2, a collection of advanced networking technologies that enable distant collaboration on complex projects. Internet-2 technologies are also being used to link far-flung educational institutions through video-conferencing. As of this writing, there are 54 member institutions in Mexico's Internet-2 consortium (CUDI 2004).

The number of internet users in Mexico is hard to pinpoint because the estimates vary, but the experts say that the numbers are growing rapidly. In 2002, the consulting firm IDC-Select (COFETEL 2004) estimated that there were 4.7 million Internet users in Mexico. Of these, 41 percent are women, 37 percent are between the ages of 15 and 24, and 40 percent (1.9 million) access the Internet from home. Snapshots International (2004) reports that there were 4.99 million users in 2003, and forecasts that there will be over 13 million users of Mexican ISPs by 2008. As of 2005 Mexico has approximately 17.1 million users connected to the internet. Overall the majority of net users are in businesses, followed by home users, and school users. One of the major reasons that it is difficult to account for the number of people that connect to the internet through their personal computers is because most people use internet cafes or their office computers. Given Mexico's economic structure, many Mexicans access the Internet outside of home. According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics as of March 2003, 5,700,000 people have personal computers. Most large academic institutions are connected to the Internet and Internet cafes can be found in many Mexican cities and towns. Internet cafes are already a $900 million market for ISPs and it is estimated that the number of users will increase about 25 percent per year for the next four years (COMTEX 2003).

The top five websites visited by Mexicans are MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Starmedia Network, and Microsoft. The average amount of time that a person in Mexico spends on the internet is 1.41 hours. Of the top five, Starmedia is the only website that caters to a Spanish-speaking audience. MSN, Yahoo and AOL attract surfers because of their hugely popular offerings, such as free e-mail and instant-messaging services. MSN also is popular because it is the default homepage on all versions of the Internet Explorer browser.

Internet access in Mexico takes many forms. The leading household technology for Internet access in 2000 was using a PC with a dial-up modem to a local ISP. The first company to provide these services was Telemex. Now Prodigy is the highest internet provider in Mexico with AOL following closely behind. Cable modem and DSL service has been established in many Mexican cities. Some parts of Tijuana have had cable modem service for almost five years. Cablevision, one of Mexico City's two main cable TV providers rolled out cable modem service in January 2001. Another ISP, Megacable, has operations in 17 cities. According to various sources, unlimited phone Internet access can be available for the cost of 30-40 dollars per month.

E-Commerce is Mexico has faced its share of ups and downs. The Boston Consulting Group and Visa recently estimated retail e-commerce in all of Latin America would reach about $580 million in 2000, an increase of 432 percent over 1999 (Hallford 2000). Mexico occupied the second position in retail e-commerce ($91 million) after Brazil ($300