Dominican Republic Telecommunications Institute (Indotel) director Jose Rafael Vargas says the agency isn’t conducting a new bidding process to grant radio frequencies because first, “we must clean the radio-electric spectrum.” He said people who can’t even manage a stall have made requests to get a radio frequency assigned to them.
Vargas said Indotel has more than 300 requests for radio and TV frequencies in all provinces, but that saturation can’t continue in a country of just 48,000 square kilometres. “Indotel cannot conduct a bidding where there are no radio-electric spectrums, to do so would be feeding the disorder by doing a distribution of frequencies in the country without planning, which has forced the regulatory agency to produce several adjustments in the last few years.”
The official was responding to North Region Broadcasters Union president Ramon Diaz, who said Indotel hasn’t conducted a bidding process to authorize operations by radio stations and television as the law states.
The Indotel director said the frequencies granted without any control in the recent past led to the country’s disorder in the radio-electric spectrum. “This became a joke; a pawnshop of frequencies cannot be allowed to favour groups of people.”
(Source: Dominican Today/R Netherlands Media Network weblog)