2024-05-13 22:25:15
Photo: Roy Leyra
Text: Editorial Cuba Noticias 360
The reports Digital 2021: Global Overview Report and Digital 2021: Cuba on digital and social network trends and statistics, created by the specialized creative agency We Are Social and Hootsuite, the most internationally used platform for network management, revealed that there are already 7 million 700 thousand residents in Cuba connected to the internet today, which which means that 68% of the population is present on the network of networks.
In the year of the pandemic, where traffic skyrocketed and social networks became the main allies and companions of confinement, more than 600 thousand Cubans started online. At the beginning of 2020, 7.1 million people were registered and the internet penetration rate (% of connected population) was 63%.
Projections for 2021 include achieving greater computerization coverage in public services such as civil status, identity, migration and other government procedures carried out by the population.
In Cuba, five pillars govern the process of computerization of society: cybersecurity, infrastructure, content creation, legal framework and responsible culture; all in a race, which sometimes becomes rocky due to the divided political criteria of Cubans.
Precisely, a decisive influence on this expansion of Internet access has, in these last two years, the arrival of mobile data services. At the beginning of the year, ETECSA registered 4 million 421 thousand mobile phones connected to data in Cuba. But the most recent figure is from this February 24 when there were more than 4 million 530 thousand users with mobile data.
Of course, the pandemic encouraged these accesses. The quarantine forced people to seek social refuge, information, supplies and entertainment in the digital space. Then, accounts and connections to social networks, video views, application downloads, live broadcasts, e-commerce and online video games grew.
Gráfica: We are Social y Hootsuite
Just so you have an idea, these reports calculate that browsing from cell phones today represents 64.1% of web traffic in Cuba.
The aforementioned study details the significant increase in data download speed in Internet connections from mobile phones (closely linked to the increase in the 4G network where more than 1 million 200 thousand users already converge), compared to a drop in that average in fixed connections
In terms of electronic commerce, a monthly average of 100 thousand new clients are incorporated into ETECSA’s Transfermóvil platform. There are already more than 1 million 700 thousand total users and more than 1 million daily operations are carried out.
More than 4.66 billion people in the world are connected to the internet today. And although the price of the internet for Cubans remains questionable, society has found in these platforms a space not only to socialize but to denounce the problems that afflict them.