How small towns in Mexico are building their own cellular networks because commercial providers won't
Where Cellular Networks Don't Exist, People Are Building Their Own — Inside the cloud that is perpetually draped over the small town of San Juan Yaee, Oaxaca, Raúl Hernández …
Context & Ripple Effects
San Juan Yaee, a cloud-wrapped town in Oaxaca, is doing what commercial carriers declined to do: putting up its own cellular infrastructure under people like Raúl Hernández. The model didn't stay a one-off — three years later, community-run operator TIC was serving underserved areas across Oaxaca and preparing to expand into four more states.
The same pattern was surfacing far from Oaxaca: rural US towns repurposing emergency-services radio towers for broadband, Detroit non-profits blending fiber and wireless for their neighborhoods, and Microsoft's Airband Initiative partnering with tiny ISPs like PackerLand to light up rural homes over existing TV towers.
First-order effects
- Residents of towns carriers won't serve gain voice and data connectivity they otherwise wouldn't have, with the town itself owning and operating the network rather than waiting on a commercial deployment.
Second-order effects
- The proof-of-concept invites organized successors: TIC scales community cellular across multiple Mexican states, while in the US, Microsoft chooses to back small partner ISPs rather than build itself — capital flowing around, not into, incumbent carrier footprints.
Third-order effects
- If self-provisioned networks keep compounding — 750-plus US communities already ran some form of community-owned broadband by 2018 (the Motherboard analysis) — regulators face pressure to formalize how community operators get spectrum and interconnection, making locally owned infrastructure a recognized layer alongside national carriers.
The trend: Connectivity gaps left by commercial carriers are increasingly filled by community-owned and partner-backed networks, from Oaxacan villages to rural America.