The Irish government sold off the rights to the wireless spectrum that will allow for super-fast 4G mobile services and made quite a bit of money in the process. But how much exactly?
So what’s all this about a wireless spectrum being sold? What went down?
Ireland’s telecommunications regulator ComReg recently held an auction for the spectrum rights in the former GSM-only bands and the MHz band, which became available last month after the switch off of analogue broadcasting, reports RTÉ News. Basically they were selling off the different radio frequencies that will allow for the fast 4G mobile services Ireland has never seen before.
Oh right, so who was involved?
The four main mobile phone companies all bought their share of the spectrum-flavoured pie. Vodafone, Meteor, Telefonica who own O2, and Hutchinson 3G Ireland, or 3 as we’d know them, now have the opportunity to develop their advanced mobile services in Ireland.
Well that’s good to know. So what did the government get out of it?
In total, the government made €854.6m from selling off the rights to the wireless spectrum. Now, that doesn’t mean Enda is going to be taking us all somewhere nice over the Christmas break. The four companies will pay a combined total of €481.7m upfront and the rest in yearly instalments until 2030 when the licences will expire.
Wow, that’s a lot. So how is that nearly €700m more than they were expecting?
Well, mainly because at the start of the year The Department of Finance estimated that they’d get roughly €170m from the auction… if they were lucky. However, the competition for mobile licences is always competitive and no doubt all the mobile companies will want to get their super-fast internet up and running over here, so the quicker they get the licences the better.
So when can we expect this super-fast broadband lark?
We probably won’t see any 4G mobile services until sometime in early-2013, but you might have already seen the EE 4G advert on TV, which features Kevin Bacon? Well EE have rolled out their 4G networks in 10 major UK cites over the past few months, so the technology is definitely there. The UK expects to have their nationwide 4G services up and running by June 2013 and according to John Kennedy writing for Silicon Republic, Ireland is already months ahead in terms of awarding licences, so we could have ours operational sooner than expected.
