The Internet in Chile has its roots in experimental tests conducted in 1986 between the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, the two main public universities in the country. Its commercialization began in the mid-1990s, and it experienced widespread adoption in the second half of the 2000s. Before this, Chile had previously attempted the Cybersyn project in 1971, which aimed to establish an almost real-time economic information transfer system with the government, but it did not succeed.
As of 2023 the Internet has become an essential part of Chilean society, with an estimated 17.69 million people, equivalent to 90.2% of the national population, having access to an Internet connection. These connections are provided entirely by the private sector and are available in various technologies such as hybrid fiber-coaxial, fiber to the home, mobile broadband, satellite Internet, and xDSL, offering a wide range of speeds and costs.
To facilitate international communication, Chile relies mainly on five submarine cables situated at different points along the national territory. These cables include the Pan-American (PanAm) cable through Arica, the South America-1 (SAm-1) cable through Arica and Valparaíso, the South American Crossing (SAC)/Latin American Nautilus (LAN) cable through Valparaíso, the Google Curie cable through Valparaíso, and the Cable Mistral through Arica and Valparaíso.
The technical regulation of the Internet in Chile falls under the purview of the Chilean Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, which operates through the Undersecretariat of Telecommunications (Subtel). Additionally, the country code top-level domain for Chile is .cl, and its administration is managed by the Universidad de Chile through NIC Chile.
History Initial attempts and Cybersyn
Before the introduction of the internet in Chile, the country communicated abroad via Letters, the Correos de Chile service had been started by Chile in 1747 (when it was still part of the Spanish crown) it was not until 1851 that a telegraphy service began for communication with the outside world, initially in 1851 wired and officially wireless since 1904 (with a certain role being played by the Vía Trans Radio Chilena Compañía de Radiotelegrafía, which would become later in VTR), later communication with the outside arose via Telephone -whose implementation had begun in Valparaíso in 1878 by Compañía Chilena de Telefonos de Edison -which in 1930 would become the Compañía Telefónica de Chile-
Perhaps the closest previous experience to the contemporary internet was the development of Cybersyn, in 1970 the world was experiencing the Cold War and Chile was led by a government that sought to establish a socialist state, After nationalizing and annexing various socially owned companies to the State, the Allende government's economic system faced the need to coordinate information on existing state-owned companies and those recently nationalized. To achieve this, it was necessary to create a dynamic and flexible information transfer system, a task carried out by a British scientist the architect of systems Stafford Beer.
Since there were 500 unused teletypes, all of them acquired during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva, each one of the machines was installed in an expropriated factory. At the control center in Santiago, a computer daily processed the information received from the factories. By processing such information, short-term predictions and recommendations for improvements were obtained. There were four levels of control (company, branch, sector and total) that had algedonic feedback (if the lower level of control could not solve a problem in a given time interval, the higher level was notified about it). The results were discussed in the operating room and an overall plan was drawn up.
The network was built between November 1971 and the same month of 1972, although it was never fully completed. The system was used experimentally in October 1972, during the October 1972 strike, when 50 000 unemployed truckers blocked the streets of Santiago. Using teletype machines, the government was able to coordinate the transport of food to the city with the approximately 200 trucks loyal to Allende and who were not unemployed.
With the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, the control center was destroyed, documents and existing telephone and teletype infrastructure were destroyed, Cybersyn could never be applied and was irrevocably aborted, additionally with the change of Cold War bloc by the Government Junta of Chile (1973), which advocated for a free market, a network for running a Self-managed economy made no sense.
The university network
The Internet in Chile as we know it dates back to the ARPANET project. In 1972 the universities of the United States copied the ARPANET model and implemented it to exchange opinions among themselves and support themselves in their academic research. However, this development was not copied in Chile until 1986, when the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile and the Department of Computer Engineering of the University of Santiago de Chile carried out some tests through a UUCP platform and mailings between them using 300-bit modems and the CTC telephone line (which at that time had national coverage), imitating a sort of Intranet model.
It was not until 1987 when Dr. Florencio Utreras (of the Universidad de Chile) connected the country with BITNET, which was an academic network of the City University of New York and Yale University, giving rise to the Internet in Chile.
Subsequently, the University of Santiago abandoned the collaboration and joined the Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC). In its beginnings, the Internet worked between local universities and with some universities abroad using modems and pre-existing telephone lines of the only telephone company in Chile. The domain .cl was given in 1986 to the Department of Computer Sciences (DCC) of the University of Chile and later began to be managed by NIC Chile, beginning to be commercialized only in the year 1997.
The commercialization of 56k and ADSL
Only in 1993 did the commercialization of the Internet begin in Chile, the then CTC (Compañía de Telefonos de Chile) acquired the technology from the University of Chile, while the technology from the Catholic University of Chile passed by various private owners until today it became Claro Chile.
The then CTC (Compañía de Telefonos de Chile) using its existing telephone network, launched the service of Dial-up Internet access in 1993 (with maximum speeds of 56 Kilobit per second), which had some peculiarities: It was not possible to use the telephone line and navigate at the same time, and there was no local connection, so traffic between users of both networks had to navigate to US and return with the service being billed per second of access and as international long distance, which made the service exclusive to a large part of the population.
Additionally, the majority of the population did not see the Internet as very useful. Outside of the academic environment, there was no interest in the Internet in Chilean society.
During the 1990s, telephone companies and long-distance carriers began to offer Internet connection services to the mass public.
The massiveness of the Internet in Chile began in 1997 and is essentially due to the creation of NAP Chile and a decree of the Chilean Government, which changed the form of Internet billing, which allowed between 1998 and 1999 to increase both Internet users, which tripled; as well as the number of minutes they used per month.
In 1997 several Chilean ISPs associated to form a local traffic exchange point, called NAP Chile, which allowed it to improve both the traffic latency and the costs of its associated ISPs.
In May 1999, the Chilean government decreed a change in the rates for those who access the Internet using telephone connections, a charging formula called "Local Tranche" would be used. The impact on the cost of use is direct for users, having a 62% decrease compared to the previous year.
One of the main access barriers, which the Internet service had in Chile, was its charge per second of connection. It was towards the beginning of the year 2000 when Entel Chile and Telefónica Chile began to incorporate fixed charge connections in their existing telephone networks technology ADSL, but at private prices for a large part of the population. With this Broadband was born and being able to have high speed was radically changing the impact of the Internet and its possible uses.
The development of the HFC network and 3G
Around 1996, almost all of the internet in Chile was by Dial-up Internet access. However, a cable television company -Metrópolis (Chile)- on 17 October 1996, put into operation an interactive video game channel called Sega Channel, which allowed the download of content by the company Sega, this being the first Internet experience on the infrastructure of cable television. VTR (Chile) launched Internet commercialization in 1999 under its existing cable television network via the DOCSIS 1.0 standard and under independent connections of the telephone network, at high speed and with differentiated payments not for the amount of time used, conditions not offered by Dial-up Internet access., and that today are the norm for all home internet providers.
However, the infrastructure and access to the Internet via cable modem, was rather modest in its early years. It was only after 2004 when Internet access via Hybrid fiber-coaxial began to become widespread, starting with a commercial strategy by VTR and the launch of its best-known promotion: the Triple Pack, which lowered the cost of contracting telephony, television and internet as a whole, and the merger of VTR with Metrópolis Intercom S.A.
In 2002, the first third-generation networks began to be implemented thanks to the different agreements made abroad by SmartCom and Bellsouth, which allowed them to sell 1xRTT equipment capable of browsing at 150 kbit/s, and with it the debut of the Mobile broadband, which would only begin to spread in the 2010s, with the increase in the issuance of a contract (postpaid), to the detriment of communication through recharges (prepaid), in 2013 the 4G and in 2022, 5G.
The development of the FTTH and satellite network
The development of the Internet in Chile until 2006 was based on the conversion and reuse of two previously existing technologies in Chile: on the one hand, the telephone line of the Compañía de Telefonos de Chile (which in some sectors dated back to 1880) via digital subscriber line technology and on the other hand the cable television network of VTR (which in some sectors dating back to 1987) via hybrid fiber-coaxial technology. Both had wide coverage in the national territory, but also had important technical limitations (especially the telephone line) in terms of speed, latency and state of the cabling, causing the rapid decline of xDSL networks from 2015 to the present.
Although internet providers via cable television infrastructure began to incorporate new DOCSIS standards and internet providers via Telephone line infrastructure progressively implemented ADSL2 and VDSL2, it was not until 2006 that the company Gtd began the deployment of a new infrastructure to provide internet, based on fiber to the home. Initially, the infrastructure was deployed in sectors residential upper class and with limited geographical coverage, later in 2012 Movistar began the deployment of its new infrastructure of fiber to the home (with special massiveness of deployment since 2020), to which Mundo and Entel joined in 2020, WOM in 2019 and VTR in 2021, the last three with limited geographical coverage.