In the process of implementing 5G in capitals, Brazil has 89 municipalities still without 4G coverage, according to data from Anatel (Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações). The fourth generation of mobile internet, used in cell phones, arrived here in 2012.
While the speed of 5G will allow the popularization of autonomous cars and remote surgeries, the speed of 4G allows routine activities for part of Brazil. Technology has boosted, for example, deliveries and rides by application, businesses that have changed people’s daily lives in the last ten years, and distance learning.
The 89 cities correspond to 1.6% of the 5,565 Brazilian municipalities, but more than 22 million people may be without 4G, as even cities connected to the network have deserts of coverage.
The state with the smallest portion of covered residents is Piauí, where only 72.25% have 4G. Access is scarcer in the North and Northeast of the country, the only regions with states where less than 80% of the population is connected to technology.
In the far north of Brazil, Evandro Silva, 32, is waiting for the fourth generation to arrive. He lives in Uiramutã, a city in Roraima that is in the Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous land and borders Venezuela and Guyana. Of the cities without 4G, it has the lowest proportion of residents connected to any type of mobile network.
Even so, it is feasible to open a cell phone service there, Silva’s business. Almost without competition, he receives around 40 customers a week in his store.
In the last IBGE census, in 2010, 8,375 people lived there — 88.1% of them indigenous, the highest proportion in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that the city has 11,014 inhabitants spread over 8,113 km², an area five times larger than the capital of São Paulo.
Some of them are in villages of various ethnicities, such as Macuxi and Ingarikó, far from the city centre. “Here, the communities are numbered by family man. Some have 30, 40 family members, but the larger ones have more than 80”, says Silva.
He says that access to banks and online courses, a demand of the population, is harmed in 3G. He remembers when the city did not even have a 24-hour electricity supply, in his childhood, and he sees how access to these services has changed the population.
“It was easier to graduate here than to go out to study”, he says. He himself is taking the degree course in Physical Education at a distance and is faced with the precariousness of the internet. The most recent was two weeks ago, when he was trying, in vain, to submit a job.
“That’s when we discovered that one of the optical fibers that connects Roraima with Amazonas had broken. Everything went down. WiFi, 3G signal”, he says, who delayed delivery and had to pay a fee to send the evaluation.
Simpler activities, such as e-commerce, are also harmed.
“With 3G you don’t even download video sometimes. With 4G people from the communities could sell their products, publish in groups, publicize their work with handicrafts and typical food — there’s flour, caxiri”, he says.
The situation in the city is expected to change in the coming years.
The 5G public notice required the companies that won the auction to commit to installing the previous generation in locations that still do not have access, such as highways. Operators that took the 2.3 GHz band, for example, will need to cover 95% of urban areas in municipalities without 4G.
When the fourth generation arrived in Brazil, the goal was much less robust: it would be necessary to install the technology in all Brazilian municipalities with more than 30 thousand inhabitants, which totaled 1,180 cities.
“The counterparts of 5G are still insufficient considering the Brazilian demand”, says Flávia Lefèvre, lawyer and member of Coalizão Direitos na Rede. For her, the biggest problem is the quality of the signal that reaches most Brazilians.
In the city of São Paulo, for example, there were almost 5.1 antennas for every 10,000 inhabitants in 2020, according to the 2021 Inequality Map. The distribution, however, is uneven.
While Itaim Bibi, a neighbor of Parque Ibirapuera, has 49.8 antennas for every 10,000 inhabitants, Jardim Helena, in the extreme east of São Paulo, serves the same number of people with just one. Although the concentration follows the flow of people heading to the center during the day, upon returning home the population of the periphery has access to a precarious internet.
In Uiramutã, there are only three antennas.
The cell phone is the main device that Brazilians use to access the internet. 58% of users accessed the network exclusively through the device in 2020, according to TIC Domicílios. The research, carried out by Cetic (Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society), also points out that this rate reached 90% among those who studied up to Early Childhood Education or belong to classes D and E.
“It is obvious that the market would not meet the demands for infrastructure in a poor country like Brazil”, says Lefèvre, who does not see favorably the maintenance of the service by the private sector. “The obligation to universalize the service and serve the population does not belong to the company, it belongs to the State.”
Marcos Ferrari, chief executive of Conexis Brasil Digital, the telephony association, says that companies have expanded beyond what was required until it was economically viable. “What is not viable would have to have public policy, which there was not”, he says.
The business’s revenue, he says, is the flow of data consumed; expenditure, investment in infrastructure and personnel.
“If the measured data flow is not enough to monetize and compensate for expenses, there is no way to make the investment, because we have shareholders to account for”, he says.
In addition to the economic issue, he sees another obstacle to universalization: the city’s antenna laws. Formulated when discussing the harm that the signal could cause to health – a debate that is now buried –, many of them harm modernization, according to Ferrari.
The law that regulated the installation of antennas in São Paulo until January of this year, for example, required 10-meter wide streets in front of the structure. “The more vulnerable, the more peripheral and the more deprived the population of the neighborhood, the more difficult it is to comply with the gauge”, he says. The city’s new antenna law dropped those requirements.
With an eye on the commitment of scope that the 5G auction established, cities have been moving to be at the first places in the 4G installation queue. An example is Teresópolis, a municipality in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro, which approved a law that relaxes the rules for installing antennas.
The focus, according to the city’s Science and Technology secretary, Vinicius Oberg, is rural connectivity. The municipality has a green belt that supplies part of the state of Rio.
There is a repressed demand for the installation of antennas, says Luciano Stutz, president of Abrintel (Brazilian Association of Telecommunications Infrastructure). “The associated operators alone had around 1,800 requests for infrastructure implementation in São Paulo,” he says.
Unlike the lawyer Flávia Lefèvre, he thinks that public policies should be structured based on demand.
“A private specialist builds, maintains and updates the connectivity network, and the government stimulates the consumption side, providing access to those consumers that it wants to encourage and include”, he says. “Every time the public policy of connectivity was based on investment in the offer (…) the initiative ended up being abandoned, without maintenance or in obsolescence.”
In common, both believe that the priority today should be universalization of 4G.
“4G is more than enough to use services and develop teaching activities and access to public services”, says Lefèvre. “We would have to have more audacious goals than those put in the public notice.”
The Ministry of Communications says that the 5G auction “will promote a significant expansion of 4G coverage in Brazil”, especially in highways, villages, settlements and isolated urban agglomerations.
“This will result in the ‘interiorization’ of 4G networks, reducing inequality in infrastructure and internet access in municipalities. Thus, populations residing in areas far from cities will be able to rely on the service”
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