Inside Ecuador’s Digital Frontier: Internet Access, Inequality, and Satellite Solutions
Fixed broadband penetration is around 15% of the population as of December 2022, equating to roughly 2.75–2.9 million fixed broadband accounts in a country of 18 million people. About 20,242 km of fiber-optic cable were laid in 2022 alone, representing nearly 10% of Ecuador’s total fiber infrastructure. The Mistral undersea cable was activated to increase international bandwidth, in partnership with América Móvil (Claro) and Telxius, with planned Galápagos subsea cable and Carnival Submarine Network to link Ecuador to the United States. By January 2023, Ecuador had 16.7 million active mobile connections (roughly 92% of the population) and about 10.8 million
