HAITI Media and Telecoms Landscape Guide - Infoasaid

160Telecommunications overviewNearly every adult in Haiti has a mobile phoneThe country enjoys good mobile network coverage, despite its mountainous terrain.Haitians not only use their handsets to communicate by voice and text message.Increasingly they also use their phones to listen to the radio and send cash to theirrelatives and friends.However, relatively few Haitians use their mobile phone to access the internet.The DAGMAR media consumption survey of November 2010 found that 84.6% of allinternet users in Haiti went online at internet cafes. Most of the remainder logged athome or at work.According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), there were 4.2million active mobile phone lines in Haiti at the end of 2011. The ITU estimated thatHaiti had a mobile penetration rate of 41.5%.However, the GSMA, the world association of mobile network operators, estimatedthat there were nearly 5.3 million mobile phone connections in Haiti at the end of2011 and that there were 51.7 mobile phone lines for every 100 inhabitants.Haitians hardly use landline phones any more following heavy damage to the wirenetwork caused by the January 2010 earthquake.The number of landlines fell by more than half from 107,000 in 2009 to just 50,000 atthe end of 2010, according to the ITU.Mobile telecommunications in Haiti are dominated by just two players: Digicel www.digicelhaiti.com , the market leader, claimed more than 4.0million subscribers in July 2012. Four months earlier Digicel acquired itssmaller rival Voilà, which had one million customers.Natcom www.natcom.com.ht , a joint venture between the Haitiangovernment and Vietnamese mobile operator Viettel. Natcom launched itsservices in September 2011. Four months later, in January 2012 it claimed tohave more than 500,000 subscribers.160