Tijuana, BC. - This morning in Tijuana, many citizens met at City Hall to protest and demand their digital signal decoders, which many did not receive as promised by the Mexican Federal Government. According to information provided by the newspaper "El Informador", a group of about 1,000 people demanded to postpone the outage due to the fact that they do not have the means to capture the new digital signal for their television sets. To this the Mayor Carlos Bustamante said that he will try to contact the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Cofetel to reach an agreement and if possible change the date of the outage.

After a long information campaign on the outage of the analog television signal in Mexico, there was a pilot program put in place for the city of Tijuana which took effect today as stipulated in the Official Journal of the Nation on May 4 of last year. This change was also accompanied by a program by Cofetel consisting of the distribution of decoder devices and / or antennas for households that do not have cable service and depend only on free public television channels.

However, many people are not happy about this change because these devices were not given to a lot of residents who live in municipalities like Playas de Rosarito and Tecate. Residents from these areas are complaining that these devices were distributed only in certain places of Tijuana.

According to the online news website Animal Politico, the "digital switchover" in Tijuana required about 300 million pesos (about $261,000 USD) for around 200,000 decoders that were delivered to the same number of households by the company Teletec, who was chosen by Cofetel for this task.

Tijuana is the first of the border cities in which the digitalization of television signals have been changed. It is projected that the next few cities to undergo this change will be Mexicali, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Monterrey. Cities in the center of the country will be gradually integrated to this digital change, where by the end of 2015, 100% of the Mexican territory will be covered.

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