Mobile Connections Driving Social Media Growth in Latin America

In my podcast about Latin America and social media, I touched on the question of broadband and mobile phone access being a factor in the increasing profile of Latin American countries in the social media space.

Unbeknownst to me, other outlets were talking about the increasing penetration of smart phones in Latin America.

According to Cellular News, there are over 500 million people in Latin America that have mobile phones. According to that same article, more than 91% of those phones use GSM and are on a 3G network.

There isn’t a hard breakdown of how many of those people are smart phone users, but that’s still a pretty big number of total users.

What I have been able to ascertain, is that a lot of the people that do have smart phones have either a RIM (Blackberry) device or a Windows Phone device. That’s according to this other article by Unwiredview.com.

Photo by: gabofr

According to that second article, Microsoft says that Windows Mobile, specifically version 6.5, is gaining share in Latin America and currently holds 26% of the smartphone market in Brazil and 24% of the market in Mexico.

Mexico and Brazil together account for about 250 million mobile phone users. I have not been able to find hard data on the breakdown of how many of those 250 million total subscribers are smart phone users either. It would be nice to know how many smart phone users there are, at least so we can put the Microsoft numbers into perspective.

Regardless, I feel that the total subscriber numbers, coupled with the availability of 3G data service and the increase in data bandwidth to Latin America that Global Crossing is installing, I see growth in the demand for social media, and other media rich products from Latin America.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement:

“The Latin American market is poised to sustain strong growth,” said John Legere, Global Crossing’s CEO. “The investments we are making are in response to the continued demand Global Crossing is experiencing across our global network for broadband services such as video over IP, social media and content delivery networks.”

Global Crossing, is a company that lays underwater data cables. Most data travels via underwater cables since satellites don’t quite have enough capacity and are still quite expensive.

Now, the question is, will all this growth in data requirements etc. be good for Latin American societies? Also, will the regional authoritarian governments put up firewalls to quell the free flow of information to and from their citizens?

What do you think?