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.