4G coverage reaches people, not territory

When people say Mexico "has 4G coverage now", they almost always mean people. According to the maps operators filed with the telecom regulator for the first quarter of 2025, Telcel's 4G network reaches 94.1% of the population. The same network covers 42.0% of the national territory. For AT&T the gap is wider still: 90.1% of the population and 24.6% of the territory.

It makes sense. Towers go where people live. But field work doesn't only happen where people live: it happens at substations, towers, wells, stretches of highway, industrial parks and warehouses on the edge of town.

	Population covered	Territory covered
Telcel	94.1%	42%
AT&T	90.1%	24.6%
Altán	89.4%	24.8%
Movistar	83.2%	16.3%

IFT, Quién es Quién en Cobertura Móvil, Q1 2025 (differentiated coverage)

And those are outdoor coverage figures, reported by the operators themselves. They say nothing about the basement of a shopping mall where the electrical panels are, or a hospital's plant room.

Usage lags in rural areas too

INEGI's ENDUTIH 2025 survey found that 88.9% of people aged 6 and over in urban areas use the internet, against 75.2% in rural areas. The gap has narrowed a lot (31.9 points in 2017, 13.7 in 2025), but it's still there. A technician serving rural sites spends more time without data, and the customer signing off on the job may not have signal either.

The decision: the phone is the source of truth during the shift

With these numbers, a field app that needs a connection to open a ticket or upload a photo forces the technician to go looking for signal or write on paper. So waydot's app was designed the other way round: everything needed for the shift lives on the device, and the server finds out later.

Specifically:

1. Before leaving, the phone downloads the assigned tickets, each site's history, task lists, forms and safety analyses.
2. Every action is recorded on the device with the time and location of the moment it happened.
3. Photos upload in the background when signal returns, without blocking work.
4. If someone in the office changed the ticket while the technician was offline, sync detects the conflict instead of overwriting.

The second point matters most. If a technician closes a visit at 11:40 in a basement and syncs at 12:30 on the street, the record says 11:40. If it said 12:30, the evidence would lose its value with the customer, with an auditor and in payroll.

How to test an app before buying it

Sales demos always run on good wifi. Try this instead:

• Turn on airplane mode, open a ticket, complete the tasks, take photos, sign and close. Then turn it off and check what time and location were stored.
• Do it on the phones your team actually uses, not the demo device.
• Take it to your worst-signal site for a week.

Sources

• IFT, Quién es Quién en Cobertura Móvil en México, Q1 2025. Coverage calculated from the maps filed by the licensees. The IFT was replaced by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT) in 2025.
• INEGI, ENDUTIH 2025 results report (June 16, 2026).