Rural telephone networks deployed in Peru since 1998 and funded by the universal access fund (Fondo de Inversión en Telecomunicaciones - FITEL) are at a critical moment, facing severe sustainability problems. In response Peru's regulator -OSIPTEL- proposed a system of differentiated interconnection charges, depending on whether the network was urban or rural, and called for a public consultation.

"Freeing Creativity: New visions on copyright" (Liberando la creatividad: nuevas visiones sobre derechos de autor) was a public seminar to discuss the risks associated with maintaining and strengthening copyright protection laws. The seminar was held on 25 February at the Pontífica Universidad Católica in Lima, Peru and included five expert speakers, including DIRSI coordinator Jorge Bossio.

The introduction of number portability is considered an important milestone for the promotion of competition in telephone markets. Nevertheless, few studies have documented the challenges associated with its implementation or its real impact on sector performance, especially in Latin America. To a large extent this lack of evidence is because it is a recent phenomena – to date only the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico and Peru have implemented number portability, while Chile, Colombia and Argentina are in the process of implementation.

Strategies for developing the information society among low-income sectors in Latin America and the Caribbean

DIRSI is requesting proposals from senior researchers in the region on any of the network's three priority themes: Bandwidth for all, Mobile opportunities and New indicators to measure market performance and ICT indicators. Case studies on Latin American countries are most welcome, as a way of generating knowledge that can later allow a comparison of the state of the art and the progress of the studied subjects.

The cost of using mobile phones in Peru is in the local press again. In a note published by the daily El Comercio  Prepagos: aquí sigue nublado (Pre-paid: still cloudy in here, referring to the high cost of mobile telephony services in Peru),  Roxana Barrantes is interviewed and DIRSI research is cited.

In an interesting column about the cost of mobile telephony published on 6 January 2010, Hay más celulares, pero ¿cuánto cuesta usarlos?  (There are more mobiles, but how much does it cost to use them?), Humberto Campodónico, columnist for the Peruvian newspaper, La República, uses data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and updated data from DIRSI’s report Affordability of mobile phone service in La

Over the last few years many Latin American regulators have taken the welcome step of making their reports and the statistical information they gather available via their websites as key sources of information for assessing universal service conditions and progress, quality of service, tariffs and overall development of the sector at national level.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the results of the evaluation of the proposals submitted to the Amy Mahan Young Researcher Fellowships in ICT Inclusion Policies.

Thirty-eight proposals were received from researchers in twelve countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,  Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela). Twenty-one of the applicants were women.

Preliminary results of DIRSI's research on mobile tariffs in Latin America were presented by Dr. Hernan Galperin at the LIRNEasia@5 conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 9 to 11 December 2009.

The results indicate that while there has been progress in the right direction, mobile tariffs in Latin America remain higher than those of developed countries and much higher than those of emerging markets in Asia.

DIRSI researcher Aileen Agüero, who is currently doing an internship with our partner LIRNEasia, attended the Communication Policy Research South (CPR South) conference, on 7 and 8 December in Sri Lanka where she presented a paper, co-authored with Harsha de Silva, on low-income populations expenditure patterns on mobile telephone services. The authors maintain that mobile phone services have the characteristics of a ‘necessary’ service and explore a number of policy implications and recommendations that arise from that assumption.