Broadband Internet reaches quilombo in Piauí and optimizes public services

The population of the quilombo Mimbó, in Piauí, connected with the world on March 27. The community, which is located in the rural area of ​​the Amarante district, about 170 km from the capital Teresina, now has fiber optic broadband services through the Mimbó Conectado program.

“There are more than 600 people who have always lived on the margins of society and can now have new opportunities for life and growth through technology”, says Viviane Moura, superintendent of Partnerships and Concessions in Piauí.

The project is part of the Piauí Conectado PPP, the country’s first public-private partnership for connectivity. The objective of the agreement is to structure the state’s broadband network, mainly for the public service offered to the population.

With the program, according to the state, the quilombola community now has five public access internet points, 66 homes with students using the internet and 98 students with tablets, which were distributed to children over 5 years old.

“The community has projects to encourage development and the generation of local income, through textile production, and we are going to encourage this with the internet and the virtual store to sell local handicrafts”, says Viviane.

The goal of the Piauí Conectado program is to take optical fiber to the 224 municipalities in the state. After three years, 168 have already received the internet, which corresponds to 75% of the state. The partnership hopes to reach 100% this year.

“These 168 municipalities represent more than 90% of the state’s population, so a large portion is being served by the project”, says Emerson Silva, CEO of SPE Piauí Conectado, the responsible concessionaire.

The PPI Piauí Conectado began to be structured in 2016, under the management of Governor Wellington Dias (PT), with the aim of decentralizing higher education and health. Thus, it sought a way to improve the services of health, education, security, citizenship, job creation, sustainability, among others, through technology.

“The path we found was to use the internet as this instrument. So we started thinking about and structuring the possibility of a private partnership to build our fiber network and provide quality internet access to government agencies”, he says. the superintendent.

The bidding took place in 2018. Until then, the state had a maximum capacity of 500 megabytes of internet and serviced about 600 points, spread across schools and hospitals. In the countryside, government agencies, schools and police stations “survived” from the modem connection point, buying internet packages in their respective cities.

Today, Piauí has ​​approximately 2,000 access points. The minimum internet delivered is 30 megs. There are 220 public squares with free wi-fi points, with 80 megabytes of internet available.

“The great challenge was to raise the demand itself and establish who this internet would actually serve. To think of a project in a way that it would be multisectoral, that could, as a public management instrument, improve the government’s service conditions in all spheres”, declares Viviane.

According to the concessionaire’s CEO, approximately R$ 200 million was invested in the first three years of the partnership’s contract, which lasts for 30 years. “The forecast is to reach R$ 900 million by the end of the project, between capex and opex [investimentos e despesas operacionais]”, says Silva.

The partnership also launched a public service offering, providing the structure set up so that operators could expand the network. According to the state, 22 providers hired the services of Piauí Conectado to bring internet to 14 municipalities.

“In the most remote cities, with little population density, with low-income people, the large operators are not interested in arriving. With the government network, we are able to subsidize the internet for these cities”, says Viviane.

Mato Grosso do Sul also entered the partnership model. On March 17, the state launched the Infovia Digital PPP. The program provides for the installation of 1,500 access points in 79 municipalities, serving secretariats, autarchies and foundations, state schools and universities, treasury agencies, regional hospitals, penal establishments, police stations, public defenders’ offices and prosecutors’ offices. Free internet will also be available in 129 squares in the state.

The Sonda concessionaire won the bid and will be responsible for the project for the next 30 years. According to the PPP, the investment will be R$ 887 million.

For Nathalia Foditsch, senior specialist in policy and regulation at the A4AI/Web Foundation, an entity that works through the accessible internet, remote and rural areas are always more difficult to connect, such as the quilombo Mimbó, in Piauí.

“Public policy efforts should be focused precisely on these regions, as well as on economically less privileged populations”, he says. “Furthermore, lower-income segments of the population pay a percentage of their monthly income per gigabyte of data that is higher than the UN-recommended parameter, which is a maximum of 2% per 1GB.”