LOGROÑO, June 1 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The central government allocates 5,673,520 euros to La Rioja in aid to provide 5G coverage to towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants. This investment It is part of the 508 million euros that will be allocated to provide the necessary infrastructure to provide 5G coverage to more than 1.8 million inhabitants of small municipalities..
A figure that is included in the provisional resolution of the call for the UNICO Redes Activas program, published this past Thursday by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, through its Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures.
The Government thus continues its strategy to digitally structure Spain, now expanding mobile connectivity with this technology also to smaller population centers, so that they can take advantage of the great economic and social capabilities it provides..
Through this investment, the active and passive equipment and infrastructure necessary to develop this technology will be provided to rural areas in municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants where there is no – and is not planned for the next three years – 4G mobile coverage. of at least 50 Mbps downstream.
It will benefit more than 1.8 million inhabitants of small towns, who will see 7,330 locations throughout Spain (174 of them newly created) access 5G coverage, in addition to providing coverage to 30,000 kilometers of the road network. .
This task will be carried out by the four beneficiary operators of this call, which will mobilize more than 566 million euros. Telefónica has been the participating company that has received the largest amount of aid, with more than 298 million euros and an allocation of 4,123 sites.
For its part, Orange Spain exceeds 115 million euros to enable 5G at 1,505 sites, Vodafone Spain assumes more than 66 million euros with 1,220 sites assigned, and the Avatel-Xfera joint venture has obtained more than 28 million to provide 5G to 482 locations.
The UNICO Redes Activas program is financed with Next Generation EU European funds within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and the call has been resolved in a competitive competition aimed at operators that provide 5G service. This call is the largest investment in history launched in Spain to deploy technology.
This program is a pioneer in Europe by allocating European funds to finance active equipment that expands the territorial deployment of 5G with full functionality (Stand Alone) in small municipalities.
With this call and the already resolved UNICO 5G Redes Backhaul program, to bring fiber optics to the sites, the Government has invested more than 1,000 million euros to promote the early deployment of 5G infrastructures, in collaboration with the private sector, in municipalities of less than 10,000 inhabitants to avoid the territorial gap.
STRATEGY TO PROMOTE 5G AND 6G TECHNOLOGY.
The Government’s 5G and 6G promotion strategy seeks to advance the structuring of the territory by leading the deployment of these technologies in Europe, investing nearly 1.5 billion euros to do so. The objective is to exploit the capabilities of 5G and 6G as transformative elements of the economy and society.
To this end, it has launched programs for each of the development phases 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 following technological generations (UNICO R&D 5G advanced and 6G).
Furthermore, Spain has been one of the first countries in the European Union to have completed the allocation of the entire 5G spectrum, to which is added the having dedicated 450 Mhz for self-provision and industrial use, and the increase in caps to allow operators better manage traffic increases.
