The Government of Spain has awarded the aid of the first call for applications for the UNICO Active Networks program, which will allocate 61.7 million euros to Castilla-La Mancha to provide 5G coverage to 881 sites belonging to 633 municipalities in the community.
“This is the largest call for a technological deployment in Spain, with the objective of also putting 5G at the service of the economy and people in municipalities of less than 10,000 inhabitants,” said the delegate of the Government, Milagros Tolón.
The final resolution published by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service, through the State Secretariat for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures, has awarded a total of 508 million euros to finance the necessary infrastructures that will provide 5G coverage to more than 1.8 million inhabitants of small municipalities. This increase in access to 5G coverage benefits hundreds of municipalities through 7,330 antennas throughout Spain, 174 of them newly created. In addition, it is planned to provide coverage to 30,000 kilometers of the road network of our country.
This programme is funded by the European funds Next Generation EU within the framework of the Recovery Plan, and has not undergone any changes with regard to the provisional resolution. Four operators have benefited from this call resolved in competitive competition, which will reach the total mobilisation of 566 million euros. This investment will provide the active, passive equipment and infrastructure necessary to develop this technology in municipalities of less than 10,000 inhabitants where there is no mobile coverage of at least 50 Mbps downstream, and it is not foreseen in the next three years.
The final distribution by province has left Telefónica as the company that has obtained the highest amount, receiving more than 298 million euros to equip 4,123 sites. Secondly, Orange Spain has exceeded 115 million euros to enable from 5G to 1,505 antennas. While Vodafone Spain has obtained more than 66 million euros with 1,220 sites allocated, and the UTE Avatel-Xfera has obtained more than 28 million to provide 5G to 482 sites.
The Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures, María González Veracruz, has stressed that this definitive resolution “is another demonstration of how the Government is structuring our country technologically, reaching the almost two million Spaniards who live in small municipalities, and their visitors. After this deployment, they will be able to access the possibilities that 5G offers and apply them in agricultural, industrial, tourist activities or the qualitative improvement of their public services provided in a more efficient and precise way.”
González Veracruz has stressed that “with this great public investment we are going to bring 5G to hundreds of villages to which this technology would probably not reach in years because it is not economically profitable for private initiative. That has been the government’s priority since 2018, and the results are tangible in the recent European Report of the Digital Decade, which has just put us back with the ‘yellow malliot’ in fixed connectivity with many points of advantage with the persecuting countries, and this aid will serve to consolidate our podium in 5G mobile connectivity.”
Once this call is resolved, the Government of Spain intends to launch UNICO Activa II imminently with almost 88 million additional destined to areas that had not been selected in it. The work of mapping actions together with the operators to locate the non-selected areas has already begun, with the aim of launching an order of bases with terms very similar to those that have been governed in the first call.
5G Active Networks is a pioneering program in Europe by allocating European funds to finance active equipment that extends the territorial deployment of 5G with full functionality (Stand Alone) in small municipalities. With this call and the already resolved of the UNICO 5G Networks Backhaul program, to bring the optical fiber to the sites, are more than 1,000 million euros invested by the Government of Spain to promote the early deployment of 5G infrastructures, in collaboration with the private sector, in municipalities less than 10,000 inhabitants.
5G and 6G technology boost strategy.
The Government’s 5G and 6G strategy aims to advance the structuring of the territory by leading the deployment of these technologies in Europe, investing around 1.5 billion euros. The aim is to exploit the capabilities of 5G and 6G as transformative elements of the economy and society.
To this end, it has implemented programs for each of the phases of development of these new mobile communication technologies in Spain with more than 318 million grants, from the development of pilot projects and use cases – through Red.es-, the integration of technology in industrial value chains (UNICO 5G Sectorial), to research and innovation in the next technological generations (UNICO R+D 5G advanced and 6G).
In addition, Spain has been one of the first countries in the European Union to have completed the allocation of the entire 5G spectrum, in addition to having dedicated 450 Mhz for self-provision and industrial use, and the increase in caps to allow operators to better manage traffic increases.