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Digital backbones networks are currently the carriers of the main goods of the information society: information and knowledge, as transportation networks (water, roads, rails, and air) used to transport people and goods across territories during the past centuries. Box 4.1 provides a succinct description of the basic structure of the Internet, considered necessary to understand the situation of the Latin American digital backbone network.

Box 4.1. Structure of the Internet network

As a technology, the Internet is a set of protocols, hardware, and software components that enable users to communicate with, and transfer information to each other, all over the world. As a network, the Internet is composed of a wide variety of small, medium and large networks that interconnect at certain points, giving the impression of a seamless network to its users. But, it actually depends on a structured hierarchy and protocol to operate it.

When the commercial potentials of Internet applications became evident, the US government decide to privatise and commercialise the initial Internet backbone network of the NSF (National Science Foundation), a process which was executed between 1993 and 1995. If the original configuration was a simple open network, the new architecture of the Internet network was a based on access nodes: the NAPs (Network Access Points). These are the physical points where backbone networks firms converge, and where the packet-switched flows are transferred between networks. The first four NAPs of the new Internet infrastructure were located near large US cities: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York.

Gorman (1998) explains the structure of the Internet network according to five levels, in which the NAPs constitute the first level, and the users constitute the fifth. The other three levels consist of networks of different hierarchies:

a) Level two consists of the large backbone providers, which interconnect large cities and continents with each other and that interconnect in NAPs with other large backbone providers or with regional networks.

b) In level three one finds the regional (or national) networks. In the US these are the networks serving the different US regions (northeast, midwest, west, east, southeast, northwest, and central California). In most other countries, these are the firms operating backbones at national level. They also (may) interconnect in NAPs. c) In the fourth level are the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) networks that provide the service to the users. These may be national or international companies, such as MCI and AOL, or smaller firms that provide access in one city or smaller geographic regions.

The Internet backbone infrastructure has a global reach, but is territorially uneven in its layout and capacities (Castells, 2001). Furthermore, as a ‘scale-free’ network, it has an uneven distribution of connectedness12 _{(Barabási, 2002). This unevenness influences the way the Internet network} operates, making important nodes grow faster than smaller. Studies examining the accessibility of cities to the global telecommunications network (Zook, 2001; Gorman, 2001) have shown that the most accessible cities are located at major network access points. This suggests that the Internet topology has created a hierarchy of accessibility in which metropolitan nodes are of strategic importance. Cities that are important nodes in transportation networks (air, rail, and highway) are also generally important on Internet backbone networks (Townsend, 2001a). On the other hand, because of the Internet's historical origins, its nodality is still concentrated in the U.S. For at least a decade, American companies have aggressively dominated the global telecommunications industry, constructing networks primarily designed to meet the connectivity needs of U.S. businesses (Townsend, 2001a). Much of the development of the Internet has been concentrated within developed countries and major urban agglomerations.

Since the main nodes are located in the U.S., and a good portion of international Internet traffic transits via the backbones that traverse U.S. territory (see Figure 4.5). While every region and nearly every country has a direct Internet connection to the U.S., direct connections between other countries have been less common. Furthermore, direct connections between different major regions are weak. The U.S. still serves as a central switching facility for inter-regional data traffic, being used as a transit point for data packets travelling from one major region to another.

Figure 4.5. Map of major international Internet routes 2004 (Source: TeleGeography Research Group - PriMetrica, Inc. © 2004).

Since 1999, this U.S.-centric structure has begun to diminish (TeleGeography, 2000a), along with the huge deployment of trans-oceanic, satellite and terrestrial fibre optic networks, and the emergence of new Internet exchange points (NAPs) in the rest of the world. In Europe, intra-regional traffic is now mostly locally switched, and does not need to go to the U.S. and back. In 2000 some African countries begun to connect themselves with France, rather than the U.S, showing the importance of cultural and trade links for the Internet connectivity 13 _(Bartlett, 2001). At the same time, there has been a shifting away from single dominant regional hubs in

the U.S., Europe and Asia towards a more diffuse network (Townsend, 2001). This trend is the result of the massive deployment of digital backbones that have been made in recent years. Latin America is still dependent on U.S. connections for Internet traffic. The U.S. dependency is not only linked to the configuration of the networks, but also linked to content dependency as U.S.-based companies are the producers of the content of the most visited sites. Although the major Spanish language content producing countries are Spain and Argentina, still many Latin American portals and e-commerce sites house their data servers in the U.S, although this is slowly changing. Until late 1999, most countries still relied on lower-capacity satellite links for their connections to the US backbones (TeleGeography, 2000a). But, thanks to the culmination of several projects of submarine cables in the region, international Internet connectivity to Latin American countries grew 479.2 % in terms in deployed bandwidth between July 2000 and July 2001, from 2.7 Gbps to 16.1 Gbps (Bartlett, 2001, with data from TeleGeography). In 2003, the total regional bandwidth was more than 25 Gbps14 _{(Telegeography, 2003).}

The two largest submarine networks that were implemented in the 1999-2001 period, were E- mergia, owned by Telefónica and the Latin American Global Crossing, respectively (see figures 4.6 and 4.7). Surprisingly, both submarine backbones display almost the same layout, being the main differences the connecting points at the Caribbean region. Cities located at the coast have been, obviously, the most favoured by the presence of the new backbones. Colombian cities, for example, are not connected by the Global Crossing trace, but three Mexican cities (Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey) are connected. The increased bandwidth has greatly improved the performance of the networks in all Latin America. The digital backbones are currently lightly loaded, but there is still congestion at the local level.

Figure 4.7. The Latin American Global Crossing (http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/network/net_ map.xml).

Figure 4.6. The E-mergia network (http://www.e-mergia.com).

Analyses of the Internet traffic routes15 _{made from the Netherlands to Latin American sites} (financial, media and government sites) in June 1999 and to the same sites in November 2002 show major changes in the routing of the data between these two dates. If in 1999 almost all traffic used the route London- New York and passed through the U.S. nodes and networks to get to Latin America, in 2002 the picture is completely different. A visible proportion of traffic is now passing through Spain and using Telefónica’s own network, by-passing the U.S. backbones and nodes and using Telefónica Data networks (E-mergia) as main carrier. Thus, they can deliver end-to-end services from most of the large Latin American cities to Europe in its own infrastructure networks. This shows the power that some large telecommunications firms have acquired, by operating their own networks at the three levels of the hierarchy: international, regional and local carriers. This ‘private’ way of operations inside the global Internet network may constitute a challenge to the open character of the Internet, since it reinforces the supremacy of the most powerful carriers, and privileges some premium locations over the rest.

As Internet expands, however, it becomes clear that this is a trend: large telecommunications carriers are competing to provide infrastructure and services on an end-to-end basis within private networks (OECD, 2002). In this new scheme, MCI, France Telecom and Telefónica are the dominant regional networks in Latin America. Their main nodes are shown in figures 4.8, 4.9 and 4.10, respectively. Other companies that have developed their own backbones and links to the U.S. during the past few years are AT&T, Latin America, Bell South and IBM.

Figure 4.8. MCI’s network in Latin America, 2004, showing Embratel network in Brazil and Avantel network in Mexico (http://global.mci.com/about/network/global_presence/latinamerica/).

In general terms, the traffic analyses reveal the following trends:

• The cities located at the northern part of Latin America are more intensively linked to the U.S. backbones, using UUNet, Equant, Cable and Wireless, AT&T and France Telecom networks.

• In those cities where Telefónica is the incumbent operator, Santiago, Lima, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, one observes an increased use of Telefónica Data networks, at different levels of intensity.

• Some cities show a dominant backbone carrier: Telefónica in Lima, UUNet in Mexico City, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, France Telecom’s Global One (Equant) in Caracas, Cable and Wireless in Montevideo. But Buenos Aires, Santiago and Bogotá show a wider variety of backbone carriers.

• Due to Telefónica’s dominance in the region and the production of Spanish language content, Spain is becoming an important traffic route.

These trends confirm that the operation of the digital Internet backbones in Latin America is a matter of a few large telecommunication companies, of US or European origin. In this context, Telefónica appears as one of the most important players, with incumbent networks in many of the large cities and operating networks at all levels of the Internet infrastructure.

In this new infrastructural system that is constantly expanding, the metropolises represent then the locations where most of the components of the new system are located. Castells (2001) states it in few words: ‘The Internet is a network of metropolitan nodes’. After the exploration of the main features of the Latin American digital backbone network, the next section examines the position of the main metropolises as nodes in the regional networks.

Figure 4.10. Main nodes of Telefónica’s network in Latin America (http://www.telefonica.es/ internationalservices/).

Figure 4.9. Main nodes of France Telecom’s Equant network in Latin America (http://www. equant.com). Santiago Rio de Janeiro Bogotá Caracas São Paulo Buenos Aires Buenos Aires Santiago Bogotá São Paulo San Salvador Monterrey San Juan New York Miami Lima Montevideo

Miami Lima São Paulo Buenos Aires Santiago Internet bandwidth in Gbps 50 10 5