5G auction announcement
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polski
In the second week of August 2020 The Ministry of Digitization informed that the 5G network auction in Poland will start after the summer holidays, and the first allocation of frequencies in the 3.6 GHz bands is planned for the first quarter of 2021.
Delayed start
The telecommunications industry was convinced that the 5G network using the 3.6 GHz band would start operating in our country already in the second half of 2020. However, the situation related to Covid-19 and the restrictions have severely delayed these plans. After nearly five months, the Ministry of Digitization informed that it reached an agreement with UKE on the new auction.
The auction cancelled in March 2020 was to include four frequency reservations from the 3.6 GHz band, 80 MHz each, whose total impact from the auction was to be about PLN 1.91 billion. Each of these blocks was to enable telecommunications operators to build a new 5G network, which would enable even a hundred times higher data transmission speeds.
New conditions?
As Wanda Buk from the Ministry of Digitization informed – “The asking price in the previous proceedings was relatively high, but let us also be aware that it is not the final price. The amount was adequate to the proceedings which were cancelled. I am not so convinced that it is necessary to repeat one to one of these proceedings – the situation has changed: we do not know whether UKE will not decide on any changes in the conditions. Maybe there will be greater coverage obligations, certainly there will be requirements related to safety, which we introduced. This also has implications for the price.
In an interview with a representative of the Ministry of Digitization, the topic of excluding Huawei from the construction of 5G network in Poland was also discussed. As we wrote in the article about the exclusion of the Chinese company, Poland may lose even 2.2 billion EUR. The deputy minister said that no country has a monopoly on 5G technology, so there are no plans to restrict specific suppliers.
