Connecting Latin America: The future of bandwidth and subsea cables
13/05/2025
By Juan Velandia, Analysts at TeleGeography
Bandwidth demand is slowing but remains strong
International bandwidth demand in Latin America continues to rise, although growth rates are decelerating steadily. This broadly mirrors international bandwidth demand trends seen at the global level, where annual growth has fallen below 30% in 2024. More localized content in regional hubs, like São Paulo, may have reduced the need for international capacity and thus affected demand growth. We also may be entering a new phase of network buildout in LATAM and, typically, as markets become more mature, we expect growth rates to slow down (as we have seen in Europe, for example). Even as these growth rates have dipped, aggregate demand in Latin America and the Caribbean more than tripled between 2020 and 2024.
Source: TeleGeography’s Transport Networks and Transport Networks Forecast Research Services
Content providers, the driving force for demand
In 2024, content providers finally passed internet backbone providers to become the main source of used bandwidth on the U.S.-Latin America route. Content providers’ demand achieved an impressive 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2020-24, reaching over 90 Tbps in 2024. For comparison, internet backbone providers had just a 21% CAGR during this time. Despite all this massive growth from content providers, it is important not to overlook the key role ISPs continue to play in LATAM. As shown in the graphic below, internet backbone providers continue to have a large share of the used bandwidth on the U.S.-Latin America route.
Source: TeleGeography’s Transport Networks Research Service
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Data Usage continues to soar
What is really driving bandwidth demand growth in LATAM? In the graph below you can see the growth in subscribers, average data usage per subscriber and total data usage for both fixed and mobile devices. The region continues to gain new subscribers at very modest rates for both fixed and mobile devices. Most of the growth is coming from a boost in the average data usage per subscriber. Mobile devices reached a CAGR of over 25% between 2020 and 2024 for average data usage per subscriber, while fixed devices achieved around a 15% CAGR during this time. As we adopt new technologies and increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications, we can expect total data usage to continue to rise even as the growth of new subscribers dries out.
Source: TeleGeography’s Transport Networks Research Service
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.