The increasing importance of digital connectivity leads governments to prioritise connectivity in their policy and infrastructure plans. Government policy, at national, regional, and especially local level, can have a significant impact on telecoms infrastructure deployment, in particular through the regulation of urban planning issues.

Cullen International’s latest research in the Americas shows that all countries in the Americas seek to streamline the deployment of mobile infrastructure to ensure service provision for the entire population. In particular, governments take measures to introduce:

• antenna laws to speed up the granting of permits by local authorities;
• codes of best practice or guidelines so that local governments apply the same technical and regulatory conditions to mobile network installations;
• rankings to measure areas with better quality of service, better signal, more antennas, fewer service blackouts, etc; and
• greater availability of public land and buildings for the installation of antennas.

In addition, governments in the Americas established specific initiatives to promote fibre deployment in backbone, transport and access networks. Most of the surveyed countries promote the deployment or sharing of infrastructure with public utility services. Mexico, Peru and the United States set specific rules to ensure and streamline access to such infrastructures. On the access network side, Colombia and Chile are the only countries with a specific and binding regulation for in-building fibre deployment.

Argentina and Peru established specific rules for infrastructure-only operators, with tower companies and wholesale operators being included in this definition.

Cullen International’s newly designed Americas Telecoms benchmark shows: the general policies to ease network rollout; if there is a specific category for infrastructure-only providers; measures to promote the construction of sites for mobile antennas; and measures adopted to facilitate the deployment of fibre networks.

For more information and to access the full benchmarks, please click on “Access the full content” - or on “Request Access”, in case you are not subscribed to our Americas Telecoms Service.