Mexico. According to the most recent report by the Institute of Telecommunications Law, IDET, in just over a decade Mexican households have experienced a revolution in the entertainment to which they have access. Cable television went from being a luxury to a daily presence in just over half of Mexican households. In just a decade the number of households with television doubled, going from 26% in 2006 to 55% of the total according to figures from the Latin American Multichannel Advertising Council (LAMAC).
This growth, in addition to greater access to news and entertainment content, has brought a significant increase in the number of households with fixed internet access because a good part of the consumers of pay television are at the same time of connectivity services, which are offered in packages of two and up to three services simultaneously.
It is worth noting that pay television has had a presence in Mexico since the 1960s but its growth was historically slow, both due to the limitations of the available analog technology, and the high costs of deploying its infrastructure to homes, as well as inputs such as equipment and audiovisual content, usually quoted in dollars. With the macroeconomic stability of the early twenty-first century, the number of providers of this service grew rapidly, reaching a number of more than 2,100 companies dedicated to this area, according to the Economic Censuses conducted by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2009.
In this period, companies undertook modernization and investment processes to evolve to digital technologies with which they were able to offer additional fixed internet and telephony services. With this they were able to develop competitive advantages over the country's telephone operator who can only offer telephony and internet. The evolution of the industry was so rapid that INEGI changed its 2013 North American Industrial Classification System (SCIAN 2013) so that cable television companies would fall within a new activity called Operators of Wired Telecommunications Services.
In addition to the growth and sophistication of the fixed telecommunications industry, competition caused the prices of pay-TV and fixed internet services to remain below the prices of other goods and services. The National Consumer Price Index (INPC) of December 2017, the most recent data, places the general price index at 130.8, while the price index for cable television remained at 111.8 and that of fixed internet services at 86.9.
Needless to say, all this has happened while the price of the dollar went from 12.3 pesos at the end of 2010 to 19.6 pesos in December last year. That is, competition has kept prices at reasonable levels despite a devaluation of the peso by almost 60% since the beginning of this decade. For comparison, the average price of the basic pay TV package in 2014 was 322 pesos per month and by the end of last year it was 366 pesos per month according to INEGI. However, of the 182 measurements made by the institute as part of the National Consumer Price Index in December 2017, 40% have below-average prices.
A positive side effect for users of telecommunications services has been the push to the fixed internet sector, which has substantially increased its speeds largely thanks to the investments made by entrepreneurs in the sector in technologies such as fiber optics and data centers that allow content to be brought closer to users' devices. The latest report published by Speedtest Intelligence in 2016 indicates that fixed telecommunications companies competing with the company of the Preponderant Economic Agent in Telecommunications (AEP-T) have access speeds much higher than those of said AEP-T
As can be seen, competition in the pay-TV sector has allowed growth in the number of households with this service, but it has also exerted a significant traction effect on the fixed internet sector, all at extremely affordable costs. The work of dozens of fixed telecommunications entrepreneurs who offer their services in communities far from the regions of interest to the AEP-T and who struggle to maintain their infrastructure and service in the face of the complex security conditions that prevail in much of the country deserve to be rewarded with a regulatory environment that ensures their growth, not that it limits its performance and its present and future growth.
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