Mexico City - Mexico's telecoms ministry has started a project to test the broadband that is available to citizens as part of their constitutional right. The Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT) has commissioned Cisco to develop an analytics tool not only to ensure that citizens have access to broadband but to check they're using the network.

Javier Lizárraga Galindo, coordinator of Mexico's Information and Knowledge Society program, said the tool will "help with intelligent decision-taking according to the real needs of the users."

Mexico Conectado – the Connected Mexico project – aims to bring broadband internet, free of charge, to low income populations through the deployment of more than 100,000 sites and public spaces. It is distributed nationwide, primarily in schools, health centers, libraries, community centers, public parks and government buildings.

Cisco has developed the Country Digitization Analytics Platform (CDAP) as an open government analytics and intelligence platform to measure the impact of the project. According to Cisco the CDAP consolidates data and transforms it into what the company called "key usability indicators."

The company explained: "These include the number of Mexican citizens using public internet, external/internal hotspot access distribution, consumption of bandwidth, and consumption of government sites through public internet, among other indicators."

It "will provide Mexico Conectado with knowledge on the use of the network, as well as on the impact that the program has nationwide, by enabling the development of intelligent information records on different indicators," said Rogelio Velasco, vice president and general manager of Cisco México. "The CDAP has been developed by our engineers in Mexico to meet Mexico Conectado's requirements of data analysis." The tool, which measures all carriers' networks, "will offer valuable information about the use of networks in Mexico Conectado," said Lizárraga.

Cisco said that CDAP will allow officials "to correlate the use of information with social, poverty, geographical and government indexes to create specific reports on sophisticated queries." The result will be "useful political and strategic intelligence for the program and the development of public policies to benefit citizens," the company added.