SANTO DOMINGO – Eight out of every 10 people in the Dominican Republic use a cell phone, where in the last seven months more than a million new users have been tallied, according to the government entity in the sector.

The “extraordinary” increase in cell phone usage has seen the country skyrocket from 82,000 cell phones in 1996 to 8.2 million today, the document released by the Dominican Telecommunications Institute, or Indotel, said.

The government office said that the most recent advance in the sector occurred on Sept. 30 with the initiation of phone number portability, which permits the user to change call providers but keep his or her same telephone number.

“This has made us one of the first countries in Latin America to implement this system,” the government office added.

Indotel also said that the Caribbean nation has experienced an “explosion” in online services due to the huge growth of the Internet here and the impact it is having on the daily lives of Dominicans.

“We’ve gone from 5,819 Internet accounts to 376,000 in just 13 years,” the report noted, adding that the figures indicate that one in every four Dominicans has access to the Web.

“These figures could be higher, if we consider the thousands of Dominicans who use the Internet at public access centers, universities and workplaces, but mainly (at) the almost 1,000 technological centers that Indotel has opened in all provinces in the country,” the agency said. EFE