The deployment of rural 5G will take a new step this week with the call for aid for the coverage of municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants. There are 544 million euros in subsidies for the active, passive equipment and infrastructure with which the operators will be able to deploy this technology. The call will be published on Tuesday in the BOE and means completing the distribution of a total of 1,405 million European funds intended for the deployment of 5G.
They will be added to the 450 million already awarded in July to bring optical fiber to the towers in municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants, in addition to other subsidies focused on R&D, sectoral aid, cyber security and Adif rail corridors.
This call comes with two specific clauses, one anti-monopoly, to prevent a single company from being left with the coverage of all the Spanish provinces, and a second to prevent the access of Chinese suppliers and which was demanded by the Commission European Union in the negotiations they held with the Central 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 determined, but it will probably tend towards the more restrictive limit. It is a modification that Economia introduced on September 30 since, in practice, only two companies 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. In other words, at the time of truth it is expected that Telefónica will compete with Vodafone in 25 provinces and Telefónica with Orange in the rest.
The second clause is the one demanded by Brussels in the negotiations and which discourages recourse to 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 own expense. An indirect veto to Chinese suppliers, who have more numbers to be considered high risk, but which has caused the discomfort of some companies.
The clause was already introduced in the regulatory bases published on June 21. One of those affected, Vodafone, has appealed because it considers that this veto is particularly damaging to them, and also to Orange, because they use Huawei more as a supplier than Telefónica, which is their competitor, as Expansión has published.
In any case, the call that will be announced tomorrow will be open until October 31, and specifies that these grants can be used to provide the necessary active and passive equipment and, where appropriate, additional infrastructure such as backhaul. pole or energy reinforcement, necessary for the provision of 5G services.
From the deployment of 5G infrastructure, adding the two calls, 90 million of aid corresponds to Catalonia, 55 million in this second and 34.8 in the first, which was focused on the backhaul infrastructure.
The aim of these grants is to accelerate the deployment of 5G in areas where, in no other way, it would not arrive immediately, and thus close the digital gap, as indicated in the Recovery Plan.
Examining the deployment of 5G, Spain is slightly above the European average, with 82.30% of households covered, but below the major economies, with Italy and Germany having 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 in the average, with 82%, and in the tail are Castile and León, with 55%.
