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Regulatory bodies are under pressure to facilitate the growth in network services, especially to poorly served areas. This provision of scaled up mobile connectivity supports business productivity and competitiveness of companies, and is understandably warmly supported by governments around the world.
Network operators are keen to keep the costs of 5G deployments down, so sharing infrastructure models are considered to be the way forward, having been successfully utilised to facilitate previous 4G rollout.
The Shared Rural Network deal, brokered by the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) for instance, has brought together EE, O2, Three and Vodafone in a £530m proposed deal (matched by £500m from the government). This will see a network of new and existing phone masts being shared amongst the four operators, removing nearly all partial ‘not-spots’ in rural areas. In return for this multi-operator cooperation, the government is intending to lower the fees for 5G spectrum in the upcoming auctions, with discussions also ongoing about removing coverage obligations from licenses.
To slash the costs for operators to meet Germany’s rural coverage targets, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica Deutschland and Vodafone Germany have proposed a coordinated construction of 6,000 cell sites across the country. This came after tough coverage targets were included in the terms of Germany’s 2019 5G spectrum auction set by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA), obliging operators to cover targets on transport routes and in rural areas.
In the Philippines, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) published the rules and regulations for a new common tower policy, with obligations to build a minimum of 50,000 new common towers. There has also been encouragement from DICT in the form of incentivising operators to build passive infrastructure in government properties, encouraging voluntary sharing.
In France, a target was set by the telecoms regulator ARCEP for the four national network operators to provide rural coverage for several thousand new sites, with 2,100 to be completed by 2022. The 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2100 MHz band licence deals stipulated that the network operators will be asked to install and share 2,000 new masts and share radio access networks in specific areas.
Similar moves are underfoot in Austria, where winners of the 700MHz frequency auction will be expected to attain minimum 5G download and upload speeds (30Mbps and 3Mbps respectively,) for 900 rural communities. Discounts on spectrum costs were also proposed by the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecoms if coverage was extended to 2,000 rural communities, with active and passive network sharing encouraged.
The New Zealand government is providing 72% of the capital cost of 600 brand new base stations to be deployed by 2023, with the remaining capital outlay and ongoing costs split evenly between New Zealand’s three national operators; Vodafone, SPARK and 2Degrees. The network operators’ combined pool of spectrum will be used to create the network, and engineers from each operator have been working with each other to integrate their range of equipment into the new joint network.
The results of this voluntary cooperation and regulatory encouragement are seen to be having a beneficial effect, not least for consumers who will see less disturbance from construction work, less visual pollution from unnecessary installations, and better rural network coverage. There’s also a case to be made for ‘greener’, more energy efficient sites, with fewer sites being built overall due to sharing, and reduced overall energy consumption.
Regulatory obligations placed on network operators will see increased rural coverage. In return, network operators will see the costs of 5G deployments reduced, as sharing infrastructure lowers costs both in capital expenditure and operating expenditure. These cost savings are expected to increase infrastructure sharing, speeding up future investments in 5G and the huge deployments of base stations and small cells that are needed.
