Article 50 of the General Law on Telecommunications establishes that the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service shall approve recommendations for the elaboration by the competent public administrations of the rules or urban instruments that affect the deployment of electronic communications networks. These recommendations may include models of municipal ordinances, elaborated with the associations of local entities at the state level with greater implementation.
It is frequent that urban planning instruments provide for the requirement of a deployment plan, in which the steps that mobile phone operators will follow to provide electronic communications services to the municipality in question are established.
Thanks to the General Telecommunications Law, the presentation and approval of such a deployment plan to the competent Administration for the granting of permits or licenses, allows an operator not to have to request a license or permit from the aforementioned Public Administration replacing such requirement with the presentation of a responsible declaration.
However, such a deployment plan, while it may seek to find ways to order the deployment of electronic communications infrastructures, must comply with the provisions of the General Telecommunications Law.
In this section, a model of deployment plan will be presented that allows to find that balance between the practical needs of a Public Administration (such as a City Council) and the requirements necessary to carry out deployments of electronic communications networks, allowing at the same time the reduction of administrative burdens that is introduced in the General Law of Telecommunications through the replacement of license by a responsible declaration.
Until the publication in this section of the Deployment Plan, a series of general recommendations are established, based on the provisions of the General Telecommunications Law:
- In the Deployment or Installation Plan, the operator must provide for the cases in which aerial or facade deployments of cables and equipment are to be carried out in the terms indicated in the previous section.
- This deployment or installation plan to be presented by the operator will be subject to the content and must respect the technical conditions required by means of a royal decree agreed in the Council of Ministers.
- The plan for the deployment or installation of a public electronic communications network shall be deemed approved if, two months after its submission, the competent public administration has not issued an express decision.
- Finally, it is not recommended that all locations of electronic communications facilities be fixed a priori in the Deployment Plan: this is very difficult to predict, due to the conditions that are at the time of installation (conditions of propagation, proximity to other stations, unexpected urban elements, among others). Therefore, a list of places that provide for the installation of telecommunication infrastructures is recommended instead, with enough alternatives to change the location of the same if the conditions require it.