MADRID, 18 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Government will start this week, foreseeably next Thursday, the auction of spectrum licenses for the 26 GHz band, the last of the priority spectrum bands for 5G that remains to be awarded and which will have a starting price of 56 millions of euros.

The auction, one of the commitments of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, comes to its conclusion with a discount of more than half on the first price proposed by the Government and the 127 million income for 5G that the 2022 budgets contemplated .

This is due to the low appetite with which the sector has received the bid for a spectrum band for which there is not yet a mature technology and which reaches a sector with an investment capacity diminished by the price war.

For this reason, the operators asked to hold the auction, at least, in 2023, however the schedule agreed with Brussels has led to it being held at the end of 2022, albeit with a discount on the starting prices of the licenses to exploit the 12 national concessions and 38 regional ones into which the spectrum will be fragmented.

All the concessions tendered will assign the use of a 200 MHz block for upstream and downstream communications on the same frequency for a period of 20 years, extendable for another 20 years.

While the national frequencies will start at four million euros, the regional frequencies have proportional prices with respect to their population.

The main peculiarity of the 26 GHz band is that it has spectrum to transmit a large amount of information at a very short distance, which means that the uses that are foreseen for it are of an industrial type or oriented to places that concentrate a large amount of information. of connections, such as stadiums or airports and transport stations.

For this reason, the Government has reserved spectrum so that companies can use it for the creation of private networks with their own frequencies.