The deployment of rural 5G will take a new step this week with the call for aid to cover municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants. There are 544 million euros of subsidies for active and passive equipment and infrastructure with which operators will be able to deploy this technology. The call will be published this Tuesday in the BOE and involves completing the distribution of a total of 1,405 million of European funds destined for the deployment of 5G.
This call comes with two specific clauses, one antitrust, to prevent a single company from being left with coverage of all Spanish provinces; and a second to prevent access by Chinese suppliers, and which was required by the European Commission in the negotiations they held with the Government until an agreement was reached in June.
The clause to prevent a single company from keeping everything, establishes that the same operator can only be the first beneficiary in a maximum of between 30 and 35 provinces. The final number remains to be specified but will probably tend towards the most restrictive limit. It is a modification that Economía introduced on September 30 given that, in practice, there will be only two companies that will compete in each province. In theory there could be four, Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange and MásMóvil, but the latter company is not expected to present itself, while Vodafone and Orange have a territory sharing agreement. That is to say, when push comes to shove, it is expected that in 25 provinces Telefónica will compete with Vodafone and in the rest Telefónica will compete with Orange.
The second clause is the one that Brussels demanded in the negotiations and that discourages the use of Chinese suppliers such as, for example, Huawei. The rule establishes that if once the project has been executed, a supplier is declared “high risk”, the operator must replace the equipment of the manufacturer considered high risk within a maximum period of two years and always at its expense. An indirect veto on Chinese suppliers, those with the most numbers to be considered high risk, but which has caused discomfort among some companies.
The clause was already introduced in the regulatory bases published on June 21. One of those affected, Vodafone, has appealed, considering that this veto especially harms them, and also Orange because they use Huawei more as a supplier than Telefónica, which is their competitor, as published by Expansión.
In any case, the call that will be announced tomorrow will be open until October 31, and specifies that this aid may be used for the provision of necessary active and passive equipment and, where appropriate, additional infrastructure such as backhaul, reinforcement of masts or of energy, necessary for the provision of 5G services.
Of the deployment of 5G infrastructures, adding the two calls, 90 million in aid correspond to Catalonia, 55 million in this second and 34.8 in the first, which was focused on backhaul infrastructure.
The objective of this aid is to accelerate the deployment of 5G in areas where it would not otherwise be reached immediately, and thus, close the digital divide, as indicated in the Recovery Plan.
When examining the deployment of 5G, Spain is slightly above the European average, with 82.30% of homes covered, but below the large economies, with Italy and Germany with coverage above 90% and France, 88%, according to the latest data from the European Commission. By autonomous communities, Madrid and Murcia are the ones with the most coverage, more than 90%, while Catalonia is average, with 82%, and at the bottom is Castilla y León, with 55%.
