Communications in Argentina gives an overview of the postal, telephone, Internet, radio, television, and newspaper services available in Argentina.
Postal
The national postal service, Correo Argentino, was established in 1854, privatized in 1997, and partly re-nationalized in 2003. There are no standard abbreviations for provinces' names; but the province name is optional and usually not needed if the postal code is correct. The format of the postal code was expanded in 1998 to include more specific information on location within cities; it now uses a letter that identifies the province, a four-digit number, and then three more letters (and slightly different numbers are used for different parts of a city, which was formerly done only in the case of Buenos Aires). See Argentine postal code for details.
Telephone
The network was initially developed primarily by ITT, and grew following the system's nationalization in 1948 and the creation of the ENTel State enterprise. Its limitations notwithstanding, ENTel gave Argentines the widest access to phone service in Latin America. Following ENTel's privatization in 1990, a new numbering plan was enacted, and the number of lines grew to cover the majority of households. A sizable minority of households, do not have land line telephone service, however. The growth of the mobile telephone market since the beginning of the economic recovery in 2003 has been impressive, with new customers now preferring a comparatively cheap cellular phone to land line household service.
As of January 2010, there are 9.2 million land lines, 50 million cellular phones and 143,000 public phones in the country. The domestic telephone trunk network is served by microwave radio relay and a domestic satellite system with 40 earth stations. It carries a monthly traffic of about 1.3 billion local calls, 400 million inter-city calls and around 24 million outgoing international calls.
International communications employ satellite earth stations - 3 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean); two international gateways near Buenos Aires; Atlantis II submarine cable (1999). This system is largely replaced with a domestic fiber optic ring connecting the main cities (actually the main central offices). This link runs at 2.5 Gbit/s. From these head central offices, local calls are routed through 10 Gbit/s fiber optic links, or 3 × 155 Mbit/s microwave links. These links are spaced at about 30 km. Some of these links (the ones serving smaller towns) are spaced at 60 km and this makes communications unreliable in certain weather conditions.
According to a report released in January 2006 by INDEC, mobile phone lines increased by 68.8% during 2005. Eleven million mobile phones were sold that year and, by then, these serviced three-quarters of the population over 14. A growing minority of users are children under 14, something that has raised concern and debate in Argentine society. A private study conducted by Investigaciones Económicas Sectoriales (IES), covering January–October 2006, found a 51.2% growth compared to the same period of 2005; by December 2007, the number of these units (40 million) exceeded Argentina's total population. Most of the phones (almost 90%) are imported from Brazil or Mexico. The monthly volume of calls made with these units (over 4.6 billion) more than doubles the number made on land lines; a further 6 billion text messages are sent, monthly.
Companies
In the 1990s the Argentine telephone system (which was formerly property of a state-owned company, ENTEL) was sold to two private corporations looking to invest in the local market: Telefónica, a telco from Spain, and Telecom Argentina, owned by Telecom Italia and the Argentine Werthein family. The country was divided in two zones, within which one of the companies was the exclusive provider of the service (a state-sanctioned monopoly).
The service was then deregulated in several steps, first allowing the participation of other companies to provide international phone call services, then mobile services and finally the domestic service.
Telecom has a subsidiary Internet service provider, Arnet. Other ISPs, such as Flash (property of the Clarín group), hire the facilities of Telecom and Telefónica.
Several newcomer companies in the telephone market (2005) offer high-speed broadband access, Voice over IP and other services to a restricted market group (businesses and high-level residential users).
Internet
The number of Internet users in the country as of 2011 has been estimated at 27 million (two thirds of the population), the number of registered domain names was approx. 1.7 million in August 2008 and the number of internet hosts in 2009, 6,025,000.