Communications in Argentina

This article is about the various communications systems of Argentina.

Telephone and Internet services

The Argentine telephone system is modern following privatization in the 1990s, and more recently market deregulation. However many families do not have fixed telephones. The privatization brought a new numbering plan. The growth of the mobile telephone market since the beginning of the economic recovery has been impressive, with many people now preferring a comparatively cheap cellular phone to a fixed household service.

Fixed lines in use: 8,411,100 (February 2006)
Mobile (cellular phones): 23,382,000 - 1,493,702,000 monthly calls (February 2006)
Public phones: 158,100 (February 2006)

The domestic telephone trunk network is served by microwave radio relay and a domestic satellite system with 40 earth stations. It has a monthly traffic of 908,763,000 monthly local calls, 188,869,000 inter-urban calls, and 14,239,000 international calls (as of February 2006).

International communications employ satellite earth stations - 3 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean); two international gateways near Buenos Aires; Atlantis II submarine cable (1999). This system is largely replaced with a domestic fiber optic ring connecting the main cities (actually the main central offices). This link runs at 2.5 Gbit/s. From these head central offices, local calls are routed through 10 Gbit/s fiber optic links, or 3 × 155 Mbit/s microwave links. These links are spaced at about 30 km. Some of these links (the ones serving smaller towns) are spaced at 60 km and this makes communications unreliable in certain weather conditions.

According to a report released on 31 January 2006 by INDEC, mobile phone lines increased by 68.8% during 2005, with 11 million mobile phones sold, and now service three quarters of the population over 14 (28.5 million). A growing minority of users are children under 14. ^*

Companies

In the 1990s the Argentine telephone system (which was formerly property of a state-owned company, ENTEL) was sold to two private corporations looking to invest in the local market: Telefónica, a telco from Spain, and Telecom, from France. The country was divided in two zones, within which one of the companies was the exclusive provider of the service (a state-sanctioned monopoly).

The service was then deregulated in several steps, first allowing the participation of other companies to provide international phone call services, then mobile services and finally the domestic service.

Telecom has a subsidiary Internet service provider, Arnet. Other ISPs, such as Flash (property of the Clarín group), hire the facilities of Telecom and Telefónica.

Several newcomer companies in the telephone market (2005) offer high-speed broadband access, Voice over IP and other services to a restricted market group (businesses and high-level residential users).

TV, radio, Internet

Radio broadcast stations:
- AM 260 (including 10 inactive stations)
- FM NA (probably more than 1,000 stations, mostly unlicensed)
- Shortwave: 6 stations (1998)
  - State International broadcasting: Radiodifusión Argentina al Exterior
Radio sets: 24.3 million (1997)
Television broadcast stations: 42 (plus 444 repeaters) (1997)
Television sets: 7.95 million (1997)
Country code: AR
ISO 3166 geocode: AR

Internet

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. Roughly, the number of residential computers that connect to Internet can be calculated as the sum of both services, which on December 2005 meant 2,222,819 units (1,303,222 clients plus 919,597 charged per communication).

The number of dial-up users decreased drastically during 2005, in favor of broadband Internet access; at the end of 2005 there were 794,614 fixed-line connections and only 508,608 dial-up users. Of these residential users, 47.1% were located in Buenos Aires city, 26.4% in Buenos Aires Province (including Gran Buenos Aires), 7.1% in Santa Fe Province, and 6.4% in Córdoba (source: INDEC, March 2006).

Among the internet access of companies and organizations, 192,279 connection contracts were valid at the end of 2005, of which only 59,179 where dial-up. Of those, 39.0% correspond to the city of Buenos Aires, 37.7% to the Buenos Aires Province, 4.7% to Santa Fe Province, 3.3% to Córdoba Province, and 6.2% to Patagonia.

The number of e-mail accounts at the end of 2005 was calculated around 3.75 million, with a monthly traffic of 653 million messages (sub-estimation, only partial information available).

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

Post

The format of a postal address in Argentina is as follows:

Person's name

Company name (if applicable)

Street address

Postal code - City - (optionally) Province

For example:

Marcelo A. Muñoz

Telefónica de Argentina

Defensa 390, Piso 5

1089 - Capital Federal

There are no standard abbreviations for provinces' names, but the province name is optional and usually not needed if the postal code is correct. The format of the postal code was expanded in 1998 to include more specific information on location within cities; it now uses a letter that identifies the province, a four-digit number, and then three more letters (and slightly different numbers are used for different parts of a city, which was formerly done only in the case of Buenos Aires). See Argentine postal code for details.

References