CHILE

A cellular phone for the ordinary Chilean is passe as the country advances to heights which even the us is yet to achieve in the field of communications. School students routinely communicate via their internet addresses and taxidrivers and housewives all walk around with cellular phones. Chile has now moved over to fibre optics, digital switching and other advances in the telecom field. "More than any place in the world, Chile is the testing ground for how to succeed in telecommunications," says William Beavington, a telecorn analyst at the Paribas Capital Markets in New York.

In early'80s, Chile privatised its telecom network, which led local companies to invest in technology to attract more customers. Long-distance phone rates are the cheapest in the world in Chile: a call from Santiago to New York costs only US 0.20 a minute compared to US $3.00 a minute from Argentina to New York. Periodic price wars between various phone companies have made the rates ridiculously cheap. One such war reduced the rate of a 10 minute telephone call to us to less than that of a firstclass postage stamp. The telenetwork in Chile is also 100 per cent digitalised.