When discussing the development of telecommunications in Latin America, the conversation typically centers on the region’s largest markets: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. The remaining countries appear in the background, barely visible on maps, as silent members of a club whose voices have been muted.
This tendency, understandable from an economic perspective, is counterproductive because it marginalizes case studies of best practices elsewhere in the region. This is especially true in a world that seems to demand the digitalization of every transactional aspect between governments, businesses, and citizens.
The industry still pursues the vision of old commercial advertisements, in which the protagonist moves from their car to their home, or vice versa, and as they go, the content they begin watching on one device automatically relocates to whatever other device lies in their path. Music or news transitions from the car to the cell phone, then to the television, then to the refrigerator, and so on, until the information is interrupted by a call that, before being answered, sends a hologram showing the caller’s information, including their image.
However, even the largest markets, with their concrete results and promises at least committed to paper, have been unable to present a holistic plan that could serve as a model for identifying which of their characteristics are exportable, acknowledging that different markets will have different needs.
It is for this reason that, much as the work undertaken by Curaçao since 2015 with its national digital transformation strategy has made that country a reference point for all Caribbean islands, its size means that some of its efforts cannot be replicated. Others, such as establishing a Tier 4 Data Center and landing seven submarine cables at different points on the island, may surprise more than a few experts—particularly when discussing digital sovereignty from a practical standpoint, offering solutions rather than speaking abstractly to impress the less informed with outdated visions.
Once again, it is the Caribbean that presents a new alternative for considering strategies within the realm of the possible. The Dominican Republic demonstrates that leadership, combined with the will to change, forms the backbone of any national digitalization and connectivity strategy.
The inflection point for this country came in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that date, there was a lag in broadband penetration, both fixed and mobile, which reflected persistent structural imbalances rather than affordability failures. Regional comparative evidence suggested that service pricing was not the primary constraint on adoption. The problem lay in the country’s territorial and productive configuration.
As in most Latin American markets, the economies of scale inherent in deploying, operating, and maintaining telecommunications networks limited the profitability of investment to areas of higher demographic concentration, reproducing a logic of selective service provision. In a context marked by high urban concentration, this logic deepened investment in cities and discouraged network expansion into lower-density rural areas.
In other words, connectivity emerged not only as an economic good but also as a structural determinant of territorial and productive inclusion. Overcoming these gaps, therefore, required deliberate public intervention—leadership oriented toward correcting market limitations and integrating digital infrastructure into a broader strategy for transformation and economic development in the Dominican Republic.
The COVID-19 pandemic served as an exogenous accelerator of transformations already latent in the Dominican Republic’s institutional and productive structures. In early 2021, the country found itself at the intersection of three converging dynamics: a global health crisis, a political transition with the installation of a new government, and an abrupt surge in demand for digital services across critical areas such as education, health, judicial administration, and public service delivery.
This convergence of pressures not only revealed the magnitude of the existing digital divide but also redefined its nature, moving it from a sectoral concern to the center of the public policy agenda. This occurred as a consequence of the government’s initiatives to shift tasks such as education online, which exposed shortcomings in coverage, network robustness, and differences in broadband quality, with the same fee but a different user experience. In this context, the State adopted a more active and programmatic stance toward connectivity, recognizing it as infrastructure that enables institutional continuity, social cohesion, and economic resilience.
The positive side of these setbacks was that the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) became visibly tangible, which led the new administration of President Abinader to issue Decree 539-20, an executive order through which the State formulated a National Broadband Plan, given that universal access to broadband and the productive use of ICT are matters of high national interest.
For this same reason, as part of the strategy, there was direct communication with the mayors of each municipality to resolve bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining permits for infrastructure deployment, thereby reducing the cost of deployment—particularly in the country’s mountainous municipalities in the interior. In other words, the horizontal strategy of having eight government agencies coordinating broadband progress intersects with a vertical one in which the national government provides information to local governments so that all actors, both public and private, are aware of the agenda’s objectives—in short: transparency.
The presence of various government agencies, alongside the president’s office and the Dominican Telecommunications Institute (INDOTEL), ensured that public policy decisions related to the digitalization of services could be viewed from a holistic perspective that included experts both in the sector being digitalized and in telecommunications. A clear timeline was ultimately established to bring the Dominican Republic closer to digital transformation.
More than a declarative formulation, this instrument inaugurated a comprehensive transformation agenda that committed the State to reviewing its regulatory capacities, modernizing its networks, strengthening human capital, and progressively digitalizing public services. Connectivity ceased to be conceived as a contingent market outcome and became an explicit objective of development policy.
In terms of spectrum policy, this shift translated into a profound reconfiguration of radio spectrum use. INDOTEL was mandated to clear the 700 MHz band, previously occupied by analog broadcasting services, to enable its use for new-generation mobile networks. Simultaneously, a new momentum was given to the transition to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), with the scheduling of the analog switch-off and the launch of test digital broadcasts. This migration not only updated the audiovisual ecosystem but also laid the groundwork for the progressive release of new spectral resources by clearing the digital dividend (600–700 MHz), expanding the State’s room for maneuver in long-term planning.
The international spectrum auction designed for 5G network deployment was conceived, in this context, as an instrument of policy rather than a revenue-raising mechanism. Its design incorporated technical, economic, and social criteria aimed at promoting a more competitive market structure and efficient resource allocation: contiguous blocks in the 3.5 GHz band, specific provisions to facilitate the entry of new operators, limits on spectral concentration, and staggered payment schemes that acknowledged the financial constraints of the post-pandemic period. This regulatory architecture demonstrated a level of institutional sophistication reflecting a more mature understanding of the link between spectrum policy, infrastructure investment, and development objectives.
One of the first actions of the new government’s digital transformation agenda was to structure and execute, in 2021, a spectrum auction for fifth-generation network deployment, incorporating blocks in the 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands, accompanied by expanded territorial coverage obligations and incentives to accelerate migration from legacy technologies to more advanced mobile architectures. The design, unprecedented in the Dominican Republic, reflected an understanding of radio spectrum management policy as a tool for guiding the pace and geography of investment, rather than as a neutral resource allocation mechanism—unfortunately, the opposite of what is observed in other Latin American markets, such as Mexico.
Likewise, the activation of the fiber-optic network of the electricity transmission company, historically underutilized for telecommunications, introduced a significant shift in the logic of fixed infrastructure provision. By enabling access to pre-existing transport infrastructure, this decision sought to reduce barriers to entry and open space for the participation of smaller regional operators, reinforcing a competition-promotion strategy based on the efficient use of public assets. In parallel, the negotiation of financing with multilateral organizations anchored these initiatives within a medium-term horizon, with the explicit objective of extending fiber networks to homes in all 158 of the country’s municipalities.
By 2023, the deployment of 5G networks had placed the Dominican Republic among the pioneers in adopting this technology in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the policy emphasis began to shift from coverage as the primary indicator toward a more complex narrative about the uses and effects of advanced connectivity.
5G was progressively framed as an enabling platform for sectoral innovation, with potential applications across urban management, tourism, port logistics, precision agriculture, digital health, and government modernization. This discursive shift reflected an empirical observation: infrastructure deployment, in the absence of complementary capabilities, did not automatically translate into significant economic or social impacts.
In response to this gap between technological availability and effective utilization, the digital strategy included measures to strengthen the innovation ecosystem. Programs were articulated by the Digital Transformation Cabinet, facilitation mechanisms were established to attract foreign direct investment associated with 5G-enabled use cases, and regulatory experimentation schemes were introduced to reduce regulatory costs for early-stage innovators. This set of interventions configured a systemic approach to digital transformation, anchored in the complementarity between infrastructure, regulation, human capital, and the dynamization of the productive ecosystem.
By 2024, a new phase of maturation of this strategy was underway, characterized by more explicit distributive and competitive dimensions. In the area of inclusion, a pilot demand-side subsidy scheme was implemented targeting lower-income households, with an emphasis on female-headed ones.
The demand-side pilot scheme shows how the government listens to operators’ requests, as a similar request has been made in nearly every Latin American country, driven in part by the American experience—though the track record of such programs in Puerto Rico reveals many of the challenges faced in markets with limited auditing of government assistance programs, resulting in fraud and abuse schemes, as occurred with Lifeline.
However, in the Dominican case, rather than an approach focused exclusively on expanding the contracting of telecommunications services, the government adopted a different approach with the launch of the Social Digital Basket (Canasta Digital Social). First, it introduced a conceptual shift by linking access to connectivity with the development of digital skills oriented toward income generation. Second, connectivity ceased to be conceived as an end in itself and was instead integrated as an input in productive insertion strategies, particularly for lower-income households.
The objective is for public policy to move away from a passive access logic and advance toward an approach that recognizes the economic and social value of connectivity based on its effective use, positioning demand—and not just infrastructure—as an explicit object of state intervention. This is being pursued alongside regulatory measures aimed at reducing structural barriers in the market, including adjustments to interconnection rates and the introduction of automatic national roaming, while strengthening the channels of interaction between the regulator and end users through digital monitoring and complaint tools.
The most recent phase of the Dominican digital transformation agenda signals a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence and advanced technological innovation. The adoption of a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, integrated within the Digital Agenda 2030 framework, expressed the State’s willingness to move beyond the infrastructure expansion stage to engage with cognitive capabilities, data, and algorithmic systems. The goal is to position the Dominican Republic as a regional node in artificial intelligence, promote the adoption of Industry 4.0 paradigms, strengthen data sovereignty, and develop high-performance and decentralized architectures.
There is also greater emphasis on advancing a dimension of technological governance sustained by principles of ethics, accountability, and rights protection. Topics such as personal data privacy, information security, and household-oriented cybersecurity education reflect an early recognition of the risks associated with the expanding use of algorithmic systems.
Perhaps the most notable change is the renaming of the coordinating cabinet established by Decree 539-20, which moved from “Digital Transformation” to “Innovation and Digital Development,” signaling a transition from the digitalization of processes toward a broader agenda of value creation, innovation, and productive development.
From a comparative perspective, the trajectory followed by the Dominican Republic can be read as a model of digital transformation with strong state leadership, characterized by regulatory and investor protagonism unusual in the region, but deliberately articulated with the private sector, academia, and civil society. The linkage between concession renewals, spectrum allocation, the modernization of the legal framework inherited from the late 1990s, and the creation of a high-level political coordination body configured a relatively cohesive institutional architecture.
This cohesion, however, has coexisted and continues to coexist with persistent structural tensions, including the high concentration of the mobile market (a de facto duopoly), territorial coverage gaps in rural areas, a relative lag in fiber-to-the-home deployment, slower-than-expected 5G adoption, and the need to find replacements for the submarine fiber optic cables landing in the Dominican Republic, which are already technologically obsolete.
The Dominican experience offers a set of relevant lessons for other Latin American and Caribbean countries facing accelerated digitalization processes. Declaring broadband a matter of high national interest served as a political umbrella that enabled far-reaching sectoral interventions. The articulation of spectrum policy, fixed infrastructure investment, demand-stimulation mechanisms, digital skills development, and regulatory framework modernization—under an agenda coordinated from the center of executive power—largely helped avoid the fragmentation that typically characterizes these efforts. Attention to gender and territorial gaps, through targeted instruments, introduced a distributive dimension that transcended rhetoric. And the early commitment to technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence places the country at the frontier on a regional scale. The ultimate test of this strategy, however, will continue to lie in its ability to translate infrastructure, data, and algorithms into sustained improvements in human and productive development.
Finally, the international recognition achieved by INDOTEL reflects the scope of the reforms undertaken, while also highlighting the depth of the commitments assumed for the future and underscoring the difference that a leadership committed to the country’s progress can make—particularly when it has an ally in the executive who understands the important role of ICT in the human and economic development of the Dominican Republic.
