Rural areas are narrowing the gap with urban centers in terms of internet coverage. In 2024, 84.8% of rural households had internet access—up 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.

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—representing 93.6% of all households.

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.

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. “Since there is no economic density to justify telecom operators installing antennas in the countryside, companies and farmers took matters into their own hands,” he said.

Rodrigo Oliveira, CEO of Sol—a company within the RZK group that operates roughly 450 antennas across Brazil, covering 12 million hectares—said the push for rural connectivity is being fueled by private investment in the absence of public sector leadership. “Farmers drive the demand for technology, we build the infrastructure, and the private sector provides the capital. It’s been a successful formula,” he said.

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.

Paola Campiello, president of ConectarAgro and new business manager at CNH, added that there’s little point in farmers owning high-tech machines if they don’t have connectivity to work with the data those machines collect. “Many data collection systems end up going unused because there’s no internet to process the information in real time,” she noted.

The association’s indicator, released in April 2025, showed that 33.9% of Brazil’s land available for agricultural use is covered by 4G or 5G networks—up from 19% in 2024. Coverage remains highest in the South and Southeast regions.

Ms. Campiello views the progress as meaningful, but still far from sufficient. “Ideally, we would match the United States, which has 70% coverage. Considering that we have one more harvest than they do, we’re leaving a lot of information ‘loose’ in the air,” she said.

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—slightly down from 13.8% the previous year.

Despite the gains, experts agree that bringing connectivity to small farmers remains the most significant hurdle. Mr. Oliveira points to a cultural challenge. “Most small farmers struggle to see value in technology and don’t invest in it,” he says. His goal, he noted, is to reduce the barriers to entry so these farmers can recognize the benefits of being connected.

Among the key strategies for expanding coverage across Brazil, Ms. Campiello underscores the importance of education, especially for the poorest farmers. “When we manage to bring connectivity to tiny areas, we show the benefits to these farmers—like a weather station that can tell them the right time to plant,” she says. In her view, demonstrating that kind of real-life transformation in small plots “can be the kick-off for change.”