Specialists National and international representatives debated the report on Wednesday Connectivity significant 2022 prepared by the Office National of Statistics (ONE), in order to obtain an x-ray of the Internet in the Dominican Republic.
The document, prepared with data from the Survey AtHome 2022 and with the method of the Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society (Cetic), seeks to provide the indicators on the quality of access to technologies for the adoption and monitoring of the policies or initiatives required in order to connect people to a Internet useful and reduce the digital divide.
To define the connectivity significant A scheme of points organized into four levels was used. connectivitymeasured by nine indicators which are equivalent to one point when an appropriate condition is met. connectivity.
In that sense, the ONE determined that only the 21.5 % of the population in the Dominican Republic has connectivity significant.
The results show that, according to the territorial disaggregation, the regions of Ozama and Cibao Norte They have the highest proportions of people with connectivity significant, with 29.2% and 23.9%, respectively.
Instead, the regions borderlands of Cibao Noroeste, with 13.3%; El Valle, with 11.1% and Enriquillo with 7.3% show the lowest proportions. Urban areas have a higher level of connectivity significant, with 23.8% of the population, while in rural areas this proportion is 9.5%.
Miosoti Rivas, director of the ONE, said that she will present the report internationally and that the institution will release other studies. She took the opportunity to remind that the law that governs the ONE, which dates back to 1959, needs to be reformulated so that the entity has greater budgetary autonomy for other projects.
Private sector: tariffs on equipment need to be eliminated
Claudia Garcia, executive of the Association of Communication and Technology Companies (Comtc), welcomed the report, but felt that for bridging the gap and move forward with the connectivity In the country, import tariffs on equipment must be eliminated, tariffs on telecommunications services must be reduced, the barriers that municipalities have to installing services must be removed, and state bureaucracy must be eliminated when executing projects.
Also, Christian O’Flaherty, executive of Internet Society, considered that the Internet from the Dominican Republic is one of the best in the region.
Other points of the report
Regarding the perspective of genderthis shows that 22.2% of women have connectivity significant, being higher than the percentage of the male population which has 20.7%.
62.6% of people with a level socioeconomic high has connectivity significant, while those from low and very low socioeconomic levels have much lower proportions, with 7.7% and 1.9%, respectively.
In addition, the population with a level educational postgraduate, master’s or doctoral degrees have the highest proportion connectivity significant, with 81.7%, followed by university or higher with 48.4% of the population. On the other hand, people with initial and basic level, as well as those who do not know or have never attended school, have 6.5% and 2.7%, respectively.