The Government makes a new call for the New Generation Broadband Extension Program endowed with 38 million euros

The Council of Ministers today approved the publication of a new call for proposals for the New Generation Broadband Extension Programme (PEBA-NGA) with an allocation of 38 million euros.

This is the last call for a Program that began in 2013 and that, when the projects in the implementation phase are completed, will have contributed to the coverage of 100 Mbps broadband reaching about 93% of the population.

The new call will go to the provinces of Almería, Granada, Jaén, Málaga, Huesca, Teruel, Zaragoza, Balearic Islands, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Alicante, Cáceres and Murcia. These are the twelve provinces that did not receive project proposals in the 2020 PEBA call that met the minimum technical requirements.

In order to encourage greater participation and concurrence of telecommunications operators, this call has reduced the minimum coverage objectives of real estate units (households or companies) for white areas. The expansion of new generation networks in these areas has a greater social and economic impact because they do not have current NGA (New Generation Access) network coverage or three-year deployment forecasts.

For the rest of the requirements, this call maintains the same provisions of the previous call, which had as novelties the incorporation, for the first time, of gray areas (those where there is a presence of a single operator that can provide services at speeds of more than 30 Mbps, but not exceeding 100 Mbps) and established the scope of provincial competition.

The final resolution of the call for 2020, published on November 17, awarded 33 projects, with investments of 186 million euros and grants of 105 million euros. These projects will extend broadband coverage to over 300 Mbps, scalable to 1 Gbps, to just over 653,000 homes and businesses.

The Spain Digital 2025 agenda has as one of its objectives to guarantee adequate digital connectivity for 100% of the population. One of the measures to achieve this goal is the Plan for Connectivity, the broad outlines of which have recently been presented to the Permanent Telecommunications Commission of the Consultative Council for Digital Transformation.

The Plan, endowed with 583 million euros in 2021, is aligned with the priorities of the European Union and will allow the further expansion of digital infrastructures through new financing instruments.