On February 4th, IFT did publish on the “Diario Oficial de la Federación” or the Official Gazette, the Program of Use and Exploitation of Frequency Bands for the year 2021. According to the Mexican Federal Law of Telecommunication and Broadcasting, Article 59, the IFT must issue until the last day of each year (December 31st), the Annual Frequency Plan for the Next year, with the Frequencies and Bands to be modified or included, and the bands to be commercialized for new service providers. The Article 60 of
this same Law does allow this Plan to have 30 working days of Public Comments for suggestions and inclusion of frequency bands and geographic coverage additional or different to those contemplated in the 2021 Plan and the Article 61 of Federal Law does guarantee IFT for more than 30 working days for its evaluation of the suggestions sent by the Public.
Therefore, IFT did publish last year the first Annual Plan for 2021 on October 21st, 2020; then it has allowed its content for Public Comments until December 3rd, 2020. After all the comments were received, then it was now time until February 2nd, 2021 for the evaluations of the Agency IFT. Now, on February 4th, here we have the official Annual Frequency Plan for 2021, finally approved by the Agency. The 2021 Plan and its modification are intended to contribute to the creation of greater infrastructure for expand coverage and improve the quality of public interest telecommunications services and broadcasting. Likewise, the inclusion of frequencies and frequency bands in the 2021 Plan and its modification, all seek to promote the efficiency in the use and exploitation of the radio spectrum, oriented to grant the maximum benefit to the end-users of the services telecommunications and broadcasting, at the lowest possible cost for them, meeting the needs of demand, coverage, and quality.
The frequency bands contemplated for the 2021 Plan are the following:
• FM broadcasting services – 88 – 108 MHz
• TDT broadcasting services – 54 – 72 MHz / 76 – 88 MHz / 174 – 216 MHz (VHF)
