Rural areas are narrowing the gap with urban centers in terms of internet coverage. In 2024, 84.8% of rural households had internet access\u2014up from just 35% in 2016. Over the past 12 years, coverage has risen by 49.8%, primarily driven by investments from major agribusiness companies and large-scale farmers. <\/p>\n
By comparison, internet access in urban areas grew by 18.1% in the same period, rising from 76.6% to 94.7% of city households. While the coverage gap between rural and urban areas was more than 40% in 2016, it had fallen to 9.9% by 2024. In total, 74.9 million households in Brazil had internet access in 2022\u2014representing 93.6% of all households. <\/p>\n
The data come from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Module of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), released last week by the Brazilian Statistics agency IBGE. <\/p>\n
According to Silvio Passos, founder and chairman of the board of Agroven, a network for agricultural innovation, this expansion has been led by companies and farmers with the capital to invest. \u201cSince there is no economic density to justify telecom operators installing antennas in the countryside, companies and farmers took matters into their own hands,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Rodrigo Oliveira, CEO of Sol\u2014a company within the RZK group that operates roughly 450 antennas across Brazil, covering 12 million hectares\u2014said the push for rural connectivity is being fueled by private investment in the absence of public sector leadership. \u201cFarmers drive the demand for technology, we build the infrastructure, and the private sector provides the capital. It\u2019s been a successful formula,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Sol has partnered with agricultural machinery manufacturers, such as John Deere, and organizations like the Mato Grosso Cotton Producers Association (AMPA), resulting in R$360 million invested in towers and signal delivery in rural areas since 2023. <\/p>\n
Paola Campiello, president of ConectarAgro and new business manager at CNH, added that there\u2019s little point in farmers owning high-tech machines if they don\u2019t have connectivity to work with the data those machines collect. \u201cMany data collection systems end up going unused because there\u2019s no internet to process the information in real time,\u201d she noted. <\/p>\n
The association\u2019s indicator, released in April 2025, showed that 33.9% of Brazil\u2019s land available for agricultural use is covered by 4G or 5G networks\u2014up from 19% in 2024. Coverage remains highest in the South and Southeast regions. <\/p>\n
Ms. Campiello views the progress as meaningful, but still far from sufficient. \u201cIdeally, we would match the United States, which has 70% coverage. Considering that we have one more harvest than they do, we\u2019re leaving a lot of information \u2018loose\u2019 in the air,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
According to the IBGE, the three main reasons for the 5.1 million households still without internet access were: no resident knows how to use the internet (32.6%), the service is too expensive (27.6%), and there is no perceived need to access it (26.7%). In rural areas, the lack of service availability remains a factor, cited by 12.1% of households\u2014slightly down from 13.8% the previous year. <\/p>\n
Despite the gains, experts agree that bringing connectivity to small farmers remains the most significant hurdle. Mr. Oliveira points to a cultural challenge. \u201cMost small farmers struggle to see value in technology and don\u2019t invest in it,\u201d he says. His goal, he noted, is to reduce the barriers to entry so these farmers can recognize the benefits of being connected. <\/p>\n
Among the key strategies for expanding coverage across Brazil, Ms. Campiello underscores the importance of education, especially for the poorest farmers. \u201cWhen we manage to bring connectivity to tiny areas, we show the benefits to these farmers\u2014like a weather station that can tell them the right time to plant,\u201d she says. In her view, demonstrating that kind of real-life transformation in small plots \u201ccan be the kick-off for change.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rural areas are narrowing the gap with urban centers in terms of internet coverage. In 2024, 84.8% of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,237,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-41333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}