Previewing Public Expansions
An IPN 30-burger plus SPR proposals for 20 new Altavoz Radio transmitters and another 10 TV facilities
If you like national public television, this week you’ve been served some heaping helpings.
On Tuesday, we learned that the IFT had awarded the Instituto Politécnico Nacional a total of 30 television station concessions across the country. Discounting that six are likely new concessions for existing stations that got hit in the Muertazo (Canal 44 in Guadalajara also got spared the same day), that’s a massive package.
The IPN has some old applications awaiting approval. In 2017, it filed for Guasave and Córdoba/Orizaba, and the next year it sought Puebla. One of just two public applications all year in 2019 was for an IPN station at Jocotitlán, Mex., to serve Toluca, and last year brought an application for Tepic. En Frecuencia has not yet received its annual transparency request for a list of applications from the 2021 PABF, so the other areas are something of a mystery. However, there are 19 available frequencies in the PABF that weren’t awarded to the SPR, CORTV or SET Puebla, and which are co-located with an SPR transmitter (Tepic would be the odd one out).
As if that weren’t enough, SPR head Jenaro Villamil visited the Chamber of Deputies and told the Radio and Television Commission of his agency’s plans for new investments in 2022.
The above map shows all of the approved SPR sites (operational and not) in green, along with 10 additional new transmitters that will be filed for in 2022:
- Ciudad del Carmen
- Palenque
- Ciudad Acuña (VHF)
- Monclova (VHF)
- Tehuacán
- Guasave
- Huimanguillo
- Nuevo Laredo (VHF)
- Orizaba (UHF)
- Tizimín y Valladolid
For those cities where the first draft of the 2021 PABF includes a proposed facility, the band is indicated. All of the others are being coordinated and were not ready for first-round publication.
If some of the cities here have seemed familiar, you probably read the EF report earlier this year about the long-range plan for the SPR and IPN networks, which essentially call for the concessions necessary to broadcast two multiplexes (one SPR, one IPN) from each of the dozens of sites the two agencies own, as well as for several new cities that the 2021 PABF did not include.
(Sorry Pachuca and Zitácuaro, you are not to be found in this presentation; there was insufficient spectrum, according to the IFT.)
As of right now, there are 28 SPR TV transmitters covering 65.7 million people — about 58.5 percent of the population. The total expansion, including the 2022 planned transmitter awards, would bring this to 67 sites covering 87.2 million people, 77 percent of the country.
Louder Loudspeaker
The SPR’s youth radio service, Altavoz Radio, is plotting a massive expansion of its own with 20 new stations being proposed across the country.
The four operating stations would be expanded to 24, reaching 23 million people (20 percent of the population) with a whole host of new facilities:
- Hermosillo
- Ciudad Obregón
- Los Mochis
- Culiacán
- Tepic
- Gómez Palacio
- Durango
- Zacatecas
- San Luis Potosí
- Tampico
- Ciudad Valles
- Uruapan
- Morelia
- Puebla
- Acapulco
- Tuxtla Gutiérrez
- Villahermosa
- Campeche
- Mérida
- Cancún
None of these cities have public FMs set aside in the first round of the 2022 PABF. Some look like they’d be quite hard to get into, such as Puebla.
