Tech in Argentina: some observations

I just went to Argentina for three weeks and returned slightly less pale and with bad jandal-shaped sunburn marks on my feet.

I saw giant waterfalls and beautiful locales, witnessed half a dozen huge protest marches from the balcony of where we were staying, and ate a lot – a lot – of delicious meat. But this is a tech blog! So let’s commence with the geekier parts of my holiday …

The first wonderful thing I learned: Argentina has the same plugs as us. This made charging my laptop, iPhone, and everything else very easy. Bueno!

At the start of the trip I had a bit of online-based work to do, so I was concerned about what kind of internet I would find. Would our apartment have any? Would it be – god forbid – dial up? Or would I have to sit in an internet café somewhere and suffer on a computer even slower than the old sloths about to be replaced at the Consumer offices?

It turns out my fears were unfounded. In fact I’d go as far as saying Buenos Aires has better internet than New Zealand.

Speeds are about the same but Argentina is well ahead when it comes to sheer ubiquity. Seriously, there is open, unsecured Wi-Fi everywhere. Our apartment had it, but so did almost every café and restaurant we ate at. They were quite proud of it – big “Wi-Fi Zone!” stickers adorned most windows in the city. As using roaming data there costs $30 per megabyte, I was pretty stoked about this. Even when we went north to Iguazu falls, Wi-Fi was seemingly everywhere. So well done Argentina, you’re ahead of New Zealand when it comes to broadband!

One thing I couldn’t bring myself to do was use a translator app I bought for my iPhone before leaving New Zealand. It picks up someone speaking Spanish through the iPhone’s speaker, processes it, and spits out a computerised voice in English. I don’t know, the thought of sticking my iPhone up to the mouth of someone manning a kiosk so I could tell how much a can of Sprite cost was far too geeky even for me.

A lot of technology there did cost more. Game consoles were at least double what they retail for here – a result of being imported unofficially from the US or elsewhere – while TVs, sound systems, and other gadgets had significant markups. It’s unsurprising that piracy of DVDs and other software is fairly common – a lot of street vendors were hawking movies that were still in cinemas.

So those are my impressions! Mainly, I’m just thankful I talked my girlfriend out of seeing Luna Nueva while we were over there. If you can work out what movie that is, you’ll understand why …

Tristan Clark - Technical Writer

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