08 January 2020

Portugal’s telecom regulator said it will hold the country’s first 5G spectrum auction in the second quarter of 2020. 

Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (Anacom), which will hold the auction between April and June next year, will auction off six bands of spectrum, including the 700MHz and 3.6GHz bands. 

“The allocation of rights of use for frequencies should be subject to an auction procedure as this is potentially a more transparent and objective process for all stakeholders and less intrusive in their business plans,” A statement from Anacom said. 

It is understood that all three of Portugal’s mobile network operators, Altice Portugal, NOS and Vodafone Portugal will take part in the auction, although none of them have yet commented on the watchdog’s proposal. 

Anacom will release more details of the auction after a 20-day period of public consultation. 

The Iberian country has been a European leader in fibre network deployment and will hope to use its relative abundance of fibre assets to fast track its 5G mobile network rollout.