Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones

The IFT Plenary addresses various issues in the telecommunications field

• IFT decided to analyze the scope and legal effects of the agreement issued by the 32nd Civil Court, prior to the issuance of the General Guidelines in respect to the retransmission of broadcast signals
• IFT approves the Annual Work Schedule, which sets out the substantive projects to be implemented in the current year
• IFT authorizes modifications to concession titles related to granting the extension of their validity
• IFT resolves the granting of concession titles for the installation of public telecommunications networks

The Federal Telecommunications Institute (Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, IFT) was notified of the agreement issued by the thirty-second civil judge on February 10th in which designates that the IFT is not competent to order the free retransmission of certain television broadcast channels, this derived from a lawsuit filed in 2011 by Televisa Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable against Comercializadora de Frecuencias Satelitales Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada de Capital Variable.

In response to this agreement, and in order to determine its scope, the IFT Plenary unanimously agreed to withdraw from the order of today and schedule for a subsequent session the resolution to issue the General Guidelines in terms of supply and retransmission of broadcast signals, structures known as must offer and must carry.

On the other hand, in accordance with the constitutional mandate, the Plenary approved the IFT Annual Work Schedule for 2014, which establishes institutional objectives and substantive projects that this regulatory body will perform this year, in order to comply with the powers that were granted to it.

The program will be delivered to the holder of the Executive Power and the Congress of the Union and will be published on the Institute website in the following days.

Furthermore, the Plenary authorized modifications to the eighth condition of concession titles for capacity provision services for the establishment of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint microwave links belonging to the companies: Operbes, S.A. de C.V., by means of agreement P/IFT/120214/4 and Megacable Comunicaciones de México, S.A. de C.V., by means of agreement P/IFT/120214/5 so that these concessions have the possibility that their applications are subject of analysis for the granting of the extension of their validity by the IFT, authority with the exclusive attribution of determining or not the origin of such request.

The eighth condition of the concession titles of these companies established that granting titles were not subject to extension, in contravention to the provisions of article 19, therefore the resolution adopted today contributes to harmonize the condition marked by current regulations.

Similarly, IFT resolved favorably to review six concession titles applications to install, operate and exploit a public telecommunications network to provide public telecommunications services that technically allow their infrastructure and their network transmission means with coverage in various regions of the country.

IFT also decided to grant, by means of agreement P/IFT/120214/12, a concession title to Redes por la Diversidad, Equidad y Sustentabilidad, AC for the experimental use of bands 845-849 / 890-894 MHz, with coverage in the Region 7"Gulf and South", comprising the States of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala and Veracruz, for a period of two years.