Communications in Argentina - Internet

Internet

The number of Internet users in the country as of 2011 has been estimated at 27 million (two thirds of the population), the number of registered domain names was approx. 1.7 million in August 2008 and the number of internet hosts in 2009, 6,025,000.

Besides monthly-paid Internet connections (either flat rate or with a number of free minutes), in Argentina there are also a number of Internet service providers that have commercial agreements with the telephone companies for charging a slightly higher communication rate to the user for that communication, though without any monthly fixed fee. There were around 12 million PCs registered in Argentina in 2011. The number of residential and business internet networks totaled around 5.7 million in 2011, of which around 5.5 million were broadband connections, mainly ADSL.

The number of dial-up users has decreased drastically since 2005 in favor of broadband internet access. This latter service grew from under 800,000 networks in late 2005 (compared to over 500,000 dial-up connections), to nearly 2.6 million by December 2007, and to over 5 million by late 2010 (82% of which were residential and 81% of which connected at a speed of least 512 kbit/s).Wireless and satellite networks expanded markedly during 2008-09, and totaled over 1.5 million in March 2011. Among residential users, 38.3% were located in Buenos Aires Province (including Greater Buenos Aires), 26.0% in the city of Buenos Aires, 8.2% in Córdoba and 7.4% in Santa Fe Province.

Among companies and organizations, 788,000 connection contracts were valid as of March 2011, 98% of which were broadband. Among the total (in late 2010), 44.7% correspond to the city of Buenos Aires, 21.1% to the Buenos Aires Province, 7.6% to Santa Fe Province, 6.0% to Córdoba Province and 4.5% to Patagonia.

The number of e-mail accounts in March 2011 was estimated at around 4.56 million, with a monthly traffic of 3 billion messages.

Argentina's Internet top-level domain is .ar.