Fewer than half of Brazilian homes have broadband access

Summary: Half of Brazilian homes have broadband access But mobile internet access keeps going up
By Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech

Only 43 percent of Brazilian households have access to broadband - but mobile Internet access has doubled in the last couple of years, according to recent research.

The research carried out by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) covered about 17,000

households and found that out the 27 million connected homes in Brazil, the biggest chunk - 51 percent - is concentrated in the richer southeast, where São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located.

According to the study, the main justification for the lack of Internet access given by households that do own a computer - about 30,6 million homes - is the cost of broadband services.

On the other hand, mobile Internet access keeps increasing in Brazil. The CGI.br research suggests that the number of Brazilians that access the Internet through mobile devices reached 52,5 million people, a 31 percent of all Brazilians older than 10 years old - back in 2011, 15 percent accessed the Internet through their mobiles.

Other statistics in the research related to the types of computing devices Brazilians own partly explain the slow residential broadband uptake: 49 percent of Brazilian homes had desktop computers in 2013 - three percentage points higher than it was in 2012 - while mobile phones were present in 90 percent of households.

According to the CGI.br research, about 85 percent of Brazilians aged over 10 own mobile phones, which corresponds to about 143 million Brazilians.


The study by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee was carried out between September 2013 to February 2014 in 350 cities.