ANACOM approves 5G auction results

Anacom approved on Tuesday 5G Frequency Auction Final Report, now followed by a ten-day period for Dense Air, Dixarobil, Meo, Nos, Nowo and Vodafone to pay for their rights to use the frequencies.

Companies now have a period of 10 working days to deposit the final amount, and as a result of this deposit, frequency use certificates have been issued, the regulator headed by João Cadete de Matos revealed.

Dense Air has been awarded four frequency groups (for 5.765 million euros), eight contracts (67.3 million euros) to Dixarobil and 12 contracts (125 million euros) to Meo.

The number of 15 contracts (165 million), Nowo with seven (70 million) and Vodafone with 11 contracts (133 million).

Once paid, Anacom will issue the bonds, and from that moment on, will issue the companies already set up They will be able to launch their first commercial 5G offerings Something that is expected to happen no later than early 2022.

What stands out at the conclusion of this long process, which began in 2020, is that the atmosphere between the companies and Anacom remains tense.

The auction ended on October 27, after 200 days, with total proceeds of €560 million, of which €84 million relate to the stage reserved for newcomers, which ended on January 11 and which Nowo (to date without supported mobile playback on its own network) and Dixarobil contested.

The main bidding phase, in which, in addition to Nowo and Dixarobil, Dense Air (the wholesale operator), Nos, Meo and Vodafone, participated on January 14 and continued until the end of October, with a total of 1,727 consecutive rounds.

Meanwhile, Anacom has changed auction rules to speed up the process, Increase the number of daily rounds Forcing companies to do so Bid for larger price increases.

At the end of the procedure, He blamed the biggest companies for ‘excessive withdrawals’, to ensure that the mistake was made by competitors who “systematically resorted to increases [de licitação] 1%”, in particular for Nos and Meo.

But, in their announcement on the draft final report (which preceded the final version approved by Anacom’s board on Tuesday), the operators once again criticized the regulator for not only the specific rules of the auction (Including reservation of spectrum for new entrants and mandatory access for these companies to existing networks), but also because of the way this procedure was carried out.

“The failure of the auction process is evident for the time it took, due to the lack of security and clarity, among other aspects, which is due exclusively to the action of the organizer, which took on the design, approval and publication of the entire auction,” Vodafone stated, in the statement issued by Anacom. .

“Of course, any attempt by Anacom to hold the bidders responsible for the delay in the procedure and the consequent delay in launching 5G in Portugal cannot be accepted,” the company added, noting that “the bidders’ strategy is set in the job and in accordance with the exact rules.” set by the organizer, with the aim of ‘maximizing its chances of obtaining the desired result’.

Meo also dismisses the blame: “Charging operators responsible for following auction extension strategies is, allegedly, deliberately neither fair nor appropriate, as operators have been limited to applying existing rules – whose approval was the sole responsibility of Anacom.”

The Altice Group also asserts that “opacity regarding the number of auction participants and the respective demand for spectrum in each category may make it difficult to understand the at-risk situations, unnecessarily delaying the outcome of the auction.”

We emphasize the fact that Anacom’s draft report does not reflect “the facts of the challenge to the Regulation since the process that led to its approval in November 2020” and recall that “the Regulation was and remains to be widely contested”, having been developed On the basis of ‘false’ assumptions such as that ‘the telecom sector in Portugal is uncompetitive’ and that having more operators ‘is synonymous with more competition’.

Overall, the three major companies highlight the fact that they maintain their lawsuits in court against the auction regulation approved by Anacom and against changes made with the auction in progress. Brytfmonline