Latin America and the Caribbean has yet to close a gap in connectivity when it comes to telecommunications network, but the new generation of technologies like 5G, together with increasing penetration of smart phones and devices may mean greater chances of closing the connectivity gap, senior executives of Huawei said at the Mobile World Congress on Tuesday.

“The good news is that it will be much easier to boost this connectivity with 5G, which will provide of 100Mbps BW with no cabling or any complicated installations for the end user,” Guillermo Solomon, chief digital transformation officer of Huawei Latin America and the Caribbean, said at a roundtable with journalists from the region.

Guillermo said that there is work to be done in terms of broadband deployment and adoption in the region, as the about 21 percent of the workers in Latin America and the Caribbean can work from home during the pandemic, while in Europe and the United States this figure is more than 40 percent.

Speaking at the roundtable, Paul Scanlan, chief digital transformation officer of Huawei, said that the trend of digital transformation is obviously going faster and faster.

“Connectivity will play a really really important role in the way people live and businesses operate as the world emerges from the pandemic and social and economic activities begin to recover,” the Huawei executive said.

The number of mobile Internet subscribers around the world reached 4.2 billion people in 2021, and about 94 percent of the world population live in areas covered by mobile broadband networks, according to the Mobile Economy 2022 report released by the GSMA earlier this week.

However, the usage gap, defined as the population living within areas covered by mobile broadband networks but do not yet subscribe to mobile broadband services, stood at 3.2 billion people.

Affordability, relevance, knowledge, and skills are among the reasons for the gap, Paul said.