Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and Public Credit is prepared to slash the annual payment it will impose on operators to use the 700 MHz band by 90 percent. The ministry said it will ask operators to pay USD 0.02 per MHz of spectrum per inhabitant, rather than the USD 0.2 rate it had previously proposed. The aim is to attract further investors to the project to roll out and operate a national shared mobile broadband network on the 700 MHz band.

According to the current timeline published by the telecoms regulator SCT, the government is aiming to launch the first tenders for the project in the final quarter of the year and award the licences in the first quarter of 2016. Interested providers include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco Systems, Huawei, Nokia, China Telecom, Motorola Solutions and Alestra. In May the ministry announced that the cost of the initiative had been reduced from USD 10 billion to USD 7 billion over the next ten years, with the private sector assuming most of the cost of deploying some 12,000 base stations.