CFE Telecomunicaciones e Internet para Todos , a subsidiary company of the CFE, announced the installation of 2,800 antennas in the country, which will connect 6.4 million Mexicans located in 18,634 towns that until now had no internet access. To achieve this, David Pantoja, general director of the state company, explained that he will use all the workers of the CFE and its subsidiaries.
“All the workers and operational force of the CFE will provide one of the basic services to which all Mexicans have constitutional rights: connectivity. And this objective cannot be achieved without the transversal effort of all the areas of the CFE’s subsidiary companies. This is a mandate for all divisions and areas, and we have to work in a synchronized manner to achieve our goal in the scheduled time”, assured Pantoja, during the meeting with CFE workers in Chiapas.
Manuel Bartlett, general director of the CFE, assured that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged the state company to be faster in the connectivity project “because time is running out.” “Now CFE is going to contribute to a new impulse, to the location of 2,800 towers that remain under the responsibility of the CFE to bring internet to everyone,” he added.
In a first stage, 873 antennas will be installed in the southeast of the country. In Chiapas 479 will be placed, in Oaxaca 359 and in Tabasco 35, three entities with the greatest backwardness in connectivity.
The antennas will be placed in hard-to-reach locations. José Carlos Paredes Aguirre, manager of CFE’s southeast distribution division, specified that they will go to regions such as the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas, Mixe, Oaxaca, and the Tabasco river zone. To achieve this, it will take advantage of the infrastructure, both the towers and the high-voltage structures, which will allow a satellite signal to be received from a telecommunications center so that other antennas also have cell phone reception, which includes voice and data service.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that in Mexico there are about 300,000 locations scattered in small communities, so it is planned to use satellites to connect these areas due to the complexity of reaching those sites.
In towns where there is no infrastructure, such as Jol Hic’Batil in Chiapas; Chilon, Chiapas; Zimatlan de Alvarez, Oaxaca; and in Comalcalco, Tabasco; they must start from scratch.
“The electromechanical work will be carried out, the effort of which is focused on the transportation of the installation of the telecommunications antennas, whose weight exceeds 500 kilos and which will have to be transported by boat to reach the communities and cross rivers such as the Grijalva and the Usumacinta. ”, assures Paredes.
According to data from ENDUTIH 2021, in Mexico only 81.6% of the population is an Internet user. Of this percentage, 56.5% is in urban areas and 56.5% in rural areas. Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz are the entities with the least access to the internet at home.
CFE seeks to increase fiber optic network
To achieve quality telecommunications services, fiber optics are necessary. The subsidiary company of the CFE assured that its network already has 8,000 activated km of fiber optics, and by the end of this year the goal is to reach 16,000 km. This is one of the axes of the CFE Telecomunicaciones e Internet para Todos project: using the fiber optic cables that are already installed in the CFE’s high-voltage towers with the support of CFE Transmission. “We have been advancing for two years giving maintenance to the optical fiber and lighting it with state-of-the-art technology.”
It has also enabled 4,000 WiFi points in schools, hospitals, libraries and public squares in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Tabasco, while at the national level they have 42,832 access points. The goal at the end of 2022 is to reach 60,000.
