The Government publishes a public consultation to identify the areas in which aid is required for broadband extension

The government has today published a public consultation on the preliminary list of white and grey areas, drawn up on the basis of the available coverage information of new generation broadband networks provided by operators.

The objective of the consultation is to obtain the final list, which will be the basis for determining the potential areas of action and reception of aid within the Plan for Digital Connectivity and Infrastructures, presented by the Government on November 30, 2020 with an endowment of 2,320 million euros.

The public consultation will be open until May 29, 2021.

El Plan for Digital Connectivity and Infrastructures, whose measures are integrated into the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, aims that 100% of the population will have access to new generation high-speed networks by the year 2025, thereby strengthening the territorial and social cohesion of the country. The Plan will act on the so-called white or grey areas, as permitted by European regulations.

The white zones are those that do not have coverage of speed networks of at least 30 Mbps, nor plans for their provision in the next three years. The grey areas included in the consultation are those in which, although having coverage or predictions of very high speed coverage in the next three years, it is provided by a single operator and the speed is less than 100 Mbps.

The increase in broadband coverage that has been achieved through the Broadband Extension Program (PEBA-NGA) in recent calls and that already reaches 95% of the population makes the identification of areas without coverage increasingly complicated, since they are smaller and more dispersed.

The State Secretariat for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures has therefore introduced various methodological improvements in the process, evolving from identification based on Singular Population Entities to that based on cadastral plots.

The zones have been identified from the georeferenced coverage provided by more than 250 operators, resulting in a much more detailed map of eligible zones. It goes from 53,000 zones identified for analysis in 2020 to 340,000 zones now, which encompass an estimate of 2.5 million real estate units.

The georeferenced coverage information provided has been, in general terms, the street-portal level coverage together with the geographical coordinates, so that this information has been positioned directly in a Geographic Information System (GIS).

The public consultation of white and grey areas, together with the consultation of expressions of interest for the reception of proposals to extend the very high speed broadband and advance the deployment of 5G in sparsely populated areas, will allow to define the instruments of public-private collaboration that facilitate the extension of the coverage of 100 Mbps to 100% of the population before the year 2025.