Whether you are visiting Mexico for a short while, living here part-time, or living or working here permanently, you’ll want to make use of modern communications. Mexico has a modern and extensive telecommunications infrastructure that includes land-lines, high speed internet, cell phones, and mobile data networks.
Mexico’s telecommunications network is one of the most well developed and robust in all of Latin America. While telephone prices have been high for many years, laws passed in 2014 and enacted fully in in January 2015 have dramatically reduced the cost of telephone calls from residential land-lines, and since 2016, prices of calls from Mexican cell phones have also fallen dramatically.
Calls to Mexican mobile telephones from landlines as well international calls to the USA, Canada, and many other destinations world-wide are now free within the price of the monthly package on landlines, and modestly-priced cell phone plans enable you to enjoy unlimited free phone calls and generous data allowances across Mexico, the USA, and Canada from your cellphone when you’re in Mexico—and the plan extends when you’re roaming with your Mexican cell phone in the US and Canada, too.
If you’re living and working in Mexico and rely on internet communications for your day-to-day activities, you’ll find that, generally speaking, internet access from landlines and cell phones is good to excellent here. Like all services, it’s subject to outages and occasional problems, but overall you’ll find the service to be reliable. WiFi hot-spots are ubiquitous across Mexico now—you can find them in stores, coffee shops, restaurants, and even some local municipalities are offering free WiFi in town and city centers, so you’re never too far away from a connection when you need one.
The most frequent problem, especially in the rainy season (May-October) is power outages, which cause internet routers to stop working; the issue can be mitigated with a local solution—read When The Lights Go Out for details.
Mexico’s 4G LTE (cellular data) network is getting better with every passing month and it offers the ideal back-up solution if your land-based internet service goes down for a while: simply switch-on your smart phone’s ‘hot spot’ and you can connect your computer to a data network to send that urgent messages to friends, family or clients.
Our Guide to Communications in Mexico explains the range of services often used by people visiting and living in Mexico, and shares ideas about how to get the best deal on your telecoms when you’re here.
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