The Tosepan Totataniske indigenous cooperative launched a mobile telephone and internet service to connect the inhabitants of the northern highlands of Puebla and offer content in native languages.
- The service is called Wiki Katat —which means “Come Come”— and offers connectivity with identity: local content, affordable prices, coverage in areas far from urban centers and service in the local language.
- Its telephony and internet offers include packages of up to 450 pesos per month (22.5 dollars). (Katat Wiki)
Wiki Katat is a virtual mobile operator connected to the Altán Redes network and with the advice of Rizhomatica, Redes AC and TIC AC, a combo of associations that has innovated in telecommunications services for indigenous communities. (Economy)
- Tosepan Titaniske, Headquartered in Cuetzalan, Puebla, it was created in 1977 and brings together 8 regional cooperatives and three civil associations, with more than 34,000 Nahua and Totonaca families.
Altan Redes is a company that offers wholesale telecommunications services for third parties —such as Tosepan Titataniske— to design supply models in areas that commercial operators —Telcel, AT&T and Movistar— avoid due to their low level of profit.
- Altan was subsidized recently by the Government of Mexico, faced with the possibility of bankruptcy almost 10 years after its creation. (The Economist)
Wiki Katat is a way “for autonomy and community communication,” Paulina Garrido Bonilla, president of Tosepan, in Cuetzalan, Puebla, told me.
- “It is a way to control what we want to know and how we want to communicate it. It is a way of appropriating these ways of communicating,” Garrido told me on the day of the inauguration of Wiki Katat, on October 2, 2022.
- “Technology can fill us of a lot of information that may not be credible or not good or that does not serve us in our context, that is why this space is important to communicate and for people to feel safer here in the territory”.
Wiki Katat will offer free access to local content in video, audio and documents in Nahuat and Totonac.
- “It is very important to have local options, that services with connectivity in Mexico and outside of Mexico and with zero rating be forged and built from the community, without users being deducted from their data plan,” said Adriana Labardini Inzunza, former commissioner of the telecommunications regulator ( IFT) and member of Rizhomatica.
- But the most important, Labardini said, “is that there has to be room for virtual mobile operators like Wiki Katat, social and community, non-profit, considering that their consumption volumes are lower than those of an urban virtual operator.”
