We show that the observed enhancement in the diphoton decays of the recently discovered new boson at the LHC, which we assume to be a Higgs boson, can be naturally explained by a new doublet of charged vector bosons from extended electroweak models with SU(3)C⊗SU(3)L⊗U(1)X symmetry. These models are also rather economical in explaining the measured signal strengths, within the current experimental errors, demanding fewer assumptions and less parameters tuning. Our results show a good agreement between the theoretical expected sensitivity to a 126-125 GeV Higgs boson, and the experimental significance observed in the diphoton channel at the 8 TeV LHC. Effects of an invisible decay channel for the Higgs boson are also taken into account, in order to anticipate a possible confirmation of deficits in the branching ratios into ZZ*, WW*, bottom quarks, and tau leptons. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Società Italiana di Fisica.