Mexican city raised its own cellular network

Villa Talea de Castro

The small town of Villa Talea de Castro (Villa Talea de Castro), with a population of about 2500 inhabitants, is located away from the densely populated areas of Mexico and busy highways, so it is ignored by all mobile operators in the country. Moreover, there is not even a land connection in the city, that is, there are no phones at all. Pulling fiber into the mountains and installing equipment for thousands of customers was considered unprofitable. For example, the operator Telcel provides communication in cities with more than 10 thousand inhabitants.

After many years of waiting, the town of Villa Talea de Castro has set an example of what to do in this situation. With the help of several public organizations and universities, local residents raised the antenna to the roof of the building, installed radio and computer equipment, OpenBTS station from Range Networks - and registered their own micro-provider Red Celular de Talea.


Antenna installation
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The subscription fee in the micro-provider network is only 15 pesos (1 dollar 20 cents) per month. This is 13 times less than the base rate of Telcel in the capital of Mexico City. Three months after the opening of the service, more than 600 local residents have already signed up for the Red Celular de Talea services.

A minute of VoIP communication with the United States, for example, costs only a few cents. Many children emigrated to neighboring America, and earlier they had to call from a payphone 10 pesos per minute.

True, the "social" provider has one limitation: the duration of calls is limited to five minutes in order not to download the communication channels completely. However, many subscribers of cellular networks would surely be glad that such a restriction was also imposed by us.

The greatest help in equipping the city with cellular communication network was rendered by the non-profit organization Rhizomatica . The city authorities received a two-year mandate from the Federal Communications Commission for “testing equipment” at 900 MHz.