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Written by

Enrique Ortegon

27 Aug, 2026 10 minutes

Ownership is changing hands, regulation is being rebuilt, and the real competitive battle is shifting from who has the most connections to who can deliver capacity, quality, and interconnection at scale.

Mexico’s telecommunications sector is going through the kind of structural reset that happens once a decade. A foreign incumbent is exiting the mobile market. The regulator that governed the industry for over a decade has been dissolved and replaced. Hyperscalers are pouring tens of billions of dollars into a country that, until recently, was a secondary stop on the Latin American cloud map. And a retail-driven MVNO has grown fast enough to force incumbents to defend ground they once considered safe.

None of this shows up in a single quarterly report. Taken together, it marks a shift in what actually matters in this market: Mexico has largely solved the access problem. The next competitive battle is about capacity: fiber density, spectrum efficiency, cloud connectivity, and the interconnection infrastructure needed to move all that traffic reliably.

Mexico’s telecom market at a glance

Mexico crossed a meaningful threshold in the past few years: internet access is no longer a minority experience. By 2025, 86.1% of people age six and older were using the internet and 78.3% of households had internet access, up from 81.2% and 71.7%, respectively, just two years earlier.[1] The country closed the year with 146.1 million active mobile voice lines, 146.8 million active mobile-internet accesses, and 29.3 million fixed-internet accesses.[2]

Much of that growth has come from falling mobile data prices rather than new fixed connections. Cost per gigabyte reportedly dropped from around $15 in 2019 to about $2 in 2023, an 87% decline, pulling lower-income users online through smartphones.[3] The gap that remains is geographic, not just economic: in 2025, 88.9% of urban residents used the internet versus 75.2% in rural areas, and household access ranged from 90.5% in Mexico City to 53.9% in Chiapas, with lack of financial resources the most common reason cited for staying offline.[1]

That gap matters commercially, too: private telecom investment fell from MXN 56.5 billion in 2023 to MXN 43.4 billion in 2024, with infrastructure accounting for 77.8% of that total.[4] Slower investment against continued demand growth is exactly the kind of gap that produces bottlenecks in access networks, backhaul, and spectrum.

Mobile: an incumbent exit, a rising challenger, and a 5G quality gap

Telcel remains dominant, holding 57.5% of Mexico’s 146.1 million mobile lines at the end of 2025, followed by AT&T at 16.5%, Movistar at 13.8%, and Walmart’s MVNO Bait at 7.5%.[2] AT&T’s own scale is real: the carrier closed 2025 with 24.7 million customers, a million net additions, 3.5% revenue growth, and 17% EBITDA growth, evidence that a network-based challenger can keep gaining ground without displacing the incumbent.[5]

The bigger structural story is happening beneath the Big Three. Bait, built on Altán Redes’ wholesale Red Compartida network and Walmart’s retail and recharge footprint, closed 2025 with 10.9 million active voice lines and 12.7 million active mobile-internet accesses under the regulator’s own count.[2] More broadly, MVNOs grew from 0.8% of Mexican mobile lines in 2015 to 11.9% in 2024,[6] a genuine structural shift, though subscriber claims in this segment vary by methodology and are worth treating with some caution.

Ownership at the network layer is shifting, too. Telefónica confirmed in November 2025 that it would exit Mexico as part of a retreat to four core markets, after an 11.3% revenue decline and roughly €1.08 billion in losses across Hispanoamérica through the first nine months of 2025.[7] By April 2026, it had agreed to sell Movistar Mexico (more than 20 million customers) for a $450 million enterprise value to a consortium led by Oxio and Newfoundland Capital Management, which plans to migrate operations onto a cloud-native platform while keeping the Movistar brand.[8] That an MVNO-enablement specialist, not a traditional carrier, is absorbing Mexico’s third-largest operator says a lot about where operational leverage in this market is heading.

On network quality, the gap between Mexico’s two active 5G networks is wide: Opensignal measured Telcel’s 5G download speeds at 180.7 Mbps versus AT&T’s 49.7 Mbps in October 2025, more than triple.[9] Adoption still has room to run: GSMA placed 5G at only 9.4% of Mexico’s mobile connections in the fourth quarter of 2024, the third-highest share in Latin America behind Brazil and Chile.[10] Mexico’s regulator forecasts mobile data traffic will grow at a 19.9% compound annual rate through 2029, reaching 26 exabytes a year, with 5G carrying 90.6% of it. That makes the 2026 spectrum auction plan, covering the 600 MHz, 800 MHz, 1.9 GHz, and 2.5 GHz bands with licenses of up to 20 years, one of the more consequential regulatory decisions on the horizon.[11]

Fixed broadband: fiber is doing the heavy lifting

Fixed broadband is now a four-player market: América Móvil (Telmex) leads with 41.0% of Mexico’s 29.3 million fixed-internet accesses, followed closely by Grupo Televisa (izzi) at 19.8%, Megacable at 19.7%, and Grupo Salinas (principally Totalplay) at 18.9%.[2] The more important shift is technological: fiber represented just 41.1% of Mexico’s fixed-broadband connections at the end of 2022, climbed to 64.5% in 2023, and reached 69.4% (20.1 million connections) by the end of 2024.[4] Telmex itself is running well ahead of that national average, with roughly 91% of its base already on fiber.[12]

That transition is changing what operators compete on. Totalplay has posted the fastest median download speed among the four major providers (134.1 Mbps, against a national average of 94.3 Mbps),[13] and the IFT’s own OECD comparisons have repeatedly found Mexico posting above-average annual growth in fiber connections.[14] Even so, Mexico ranked only 84th of 181 countries on fixed broadband speed in a May 2024 global index.[15] Fast growth off a low base is not the same as regional leadership, and there’s real room to differentiate on quality rather than just coverage.

Streaming and cloud: where the traffic is actually going

Video is now the default use case for Mexican connectivity. In 2024, 55% of surveyed consumers watched audiovisual content online, up from just 26% in 2015, spending an average of three hours a day with digital video versus 2.3 hours with broadcast TV.[16] The paid tier is maturing rather than exploding. The CIU counted 15 million SVOD subscriptions at the end of 2025, up 4.9%, with Netflix (39.2%), Disney+ (20.0%), and HBO Max (18.0%) leading a field that also includes Prime Video, ViX Premium, Paramount+, and Claro Video.[17] Notably, Ampere Analysis projected TelevisaUnivision’s ViX to be the fastest-growing major streaming service in the Americas in 2025,[18] a sign that sustained, high-bitrate video demand in Mexico is increasingly homegrown, which raises the stakes for local caching, CDN deployment, and interconnection quality rather than just backbone capacity.

Cloud is the newer, faster-moving piece. Google Cloud opened its Querétaro region in December 2024,[19] AWS launched its Mexico Central Region in January 2025 with plans to invest more than $5 billion over 15 years,[20] and Microsoft has committed $1.3 billion over three years to cloud and AI infrastructure.[21] Mexico’s data center capacity is estimated to have grown roughly 142% in 2025, to about 280 MW, with SENER projecting data centers will add 1,500 MW of demand by 2030.[22] But compute doesn’t scale on its own: CBRE reported less than 1 MW of available data-center capacity in Querétaro in the first quarter of 2025 because demand had outpaced supply, with power constraints already limiting absorption.[23] Markets that pair compute growth with power, fiber, and carrier-neutral interconnection will capture that investment; markets that add compute without it risk congestion instead.

The regulatory reset

Layered on top of all of this is a genuine regulatory transition. A law passed in July 2025 dissolved the IFT (Mexico’s independent regulator since 2013) and replaced it with new government-linked bodies, including the Comisión Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones now cited throughout this piece.[24] Critics warn the change could introduce more political influence into spectrum and competition decisions right as major investment decisions, including the 2026 spectrum auction, are being made. It’s a real planning variable for anyone building in this market, not a formality.

Four trends to watch through 2030

  • Competition is coming from business-model innovation as much as network ownership. Bait, other MVNOs, wholesale platforms, and Movistar’s new owner are widening the field without yet overturning Telcel’s scale.
  • Fiber, 5G, cloud, and streaming are converging into one traffic story. Each is tracked separately, but all four are driving demand for transport, peering, interconnection, and local infrastructure at the same time.
  • Power and network diversity may end up more limiting than demand. Strong hyperscaler interest does not automatically translate into deployable capacity, as Querétaro’s power constraints already show.
  • Quality is overtaking headline penetration as the real differentiator. With household and mobile penetration already above 78% and 86% respectively, the next round of competitive advantage will come from latency, resilience, rural service quality, and how efficiently traffic is exchanged inside the country.

Key takeaways

  • Ownership is changing hands at the network layer. Telefónica’s exit and Movistar’s sale to an MVNO-technology consortium show wholesale, asset-light models gaining credibility at meaningful scale.
  • 5G quality, not just coverage, is now the competitive differentiator. Telcel’s speed advantage over AT&T is large enough to matter for enterprise and content-delivery decisions.
  • Regulatory transition is a real planning variable. The shift from the IFT to the CRT and related bodies adds uncertainty to spectrum and infrastructure timelines right as the 2026 auction approaches.
  • Cloud and AI demand is now a bigger swing factor than consumer broadband growth, but only where power and interconnection capacity keep pace with hyperscaler commitments.
  • Mexico has largely solved access. Its next challenge, and its next opportunity, is building the capacity: fiber, spectrum, power, and interconnection, fast enough to keep up.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. INEGI, Encuesta Nacional sobre Disponibilidad y Uso de Tecnologías de la Información en los Hogares (ENDUTIH) 2025, June 16, 2026.
  2. Comisión Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones (CRT), Reporte de Datos del Sector de Telecomunicaciones: Cuarto Trimestre de 2025, 2026.
  3. DataReportal (data cited in TS2.tech), “State of Internet Access in Mexico: The Digital Divide, Ground and Sky,” May 29, 2025 (updated August 14, 2026).
  4. Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones (IFT), Nota Técnica: Indicadores de los Sectores de Telecomunicaciones y Radiodifusión al 4T 2024, 2025.
  5. AT&T México, AT&T presenta sus resultados financieros y operativos de 2025, February 23, 2026.
  6. Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, Evolución de la oferta de telefonía móvil de los operadores móviles virtuales, 2015 vs. 2024, December 5, 2024.
  7. Infobae, “Telefónica anuncia su salida de México: ¿qué pasará con los más de 21 millones de clientes de Movistar?,” November 5, 2025.
  8. Telefónica, Sale of Telefónica México, April 7, 2026.
  9. Opensignal, Mexico, October 2025, Mobile Network Experience Report.
  10. GSMA, The Mobile Economy Latin America 2026, May 2026.
  11. Comisión Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones, Plan de Licitaciones 2026, 2026.
  12. Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, “México presenta el mayor crecimiento anual de accesos de banda ancha fija a través de fibra óptica…” (Comunicado 70/2024), July 25, 2024.
  13. América Móvil, Q2 2026 Financial and Operating Report, July 2026.
  14. TelecomLead, “Best ISP in Mexico 2026: Telmex Leads Broadband Market as Totalplay Delivers Fastest Fiber Speeds,” July 3, 2026.
  15. Freedom House (data cited in TS2.tech), “State of Internet Access in Mexico: The Digital Divide, Ground and Sky,” 2025.
  16. Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, Encuesta Nacional de Consumo de Contenidos Audiovisuales 2024, December 9, 2024.
  17. The Competitive Intelligence Unit, SVOD en México al Cierre de 2025: Consolidación, Madurez y Reconfiguración Competitiva, April 27, 2026.
  18. Ampere Analysis (cited in Advanced Television), “Forecast: ViX the fastest streamer in the Americas in 2025,” June 24, 2025.
  19. Google Cloud, Google Cloud Announces Its 41st Cloud Region in Mexico, December 4, 2024.
  20. Amazon Web Services, Now Open: AWS Mexico Central Region, January 14, 2025.
  21. Microsoft, $1.3 Billion Investment in Cloud and AI Infrastructure in Mexico, September 24, 2024.
  22. Mexico Business News, “Enablers Will Decide If Mexico Keeps Its Data Center Boom,” August 6, 2026.
  23. CBRE, Global Data Center Trends 2025, June 2025.
  24. BNamericas, “The end of an era for Mexico’s telecoms,” October 17, 2025.
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Enrique Ortegon

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