Telecoms · 19 March 2019

Germany's 5G spectrum auction begins in Mainz

Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefónica and 1&1 Drillisch begin bidding for 5G frequencies in a sealed-off, heavily guarded building in Mainz.

The 5G spectrum auction has begun. In a plain, sealed-off and heavily guarded office building in Mainz – the same location where the UMTS auction raised 50.8 billion euros back in 2000 – Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefónica and 1&1 Drillisch have started bidding for the radio frequencies that will shape Germany’s mobile future.

I covered the opening day for Handelsblatt and filmed the start of the process. The bidding will continue for weeks. At its end, Germany’s 5G era will have its starting conditions: which carrier gets which spectrum, and what build-out obligations they accept in return.

Published in Handelsblatt

March 18, 2019 ·Spectrum Allocation

Germany's 5G spectrum auction begins: top secret and billions on the line

The auction of radio frequencies for the future-defining 5G network begins in Mainz on Tuesday. Security precautions are immense.

By Stephan Scheuer

Machine translation. The verbatim German original is on handelsblatt.com (link below).

The plain office building at Canisiusstraße 21 in Mainz is set to become one of the most closely guarded locations in Germany in the coming weeks. An entire wing has been sealed off, windows fitted with special films to protect conversations from eavesdropping. In the evenings the rooms are locked; the building is under round-the-clock surveillance. Anyone entering must hand in their mobile phone at the entrance.

Experts from the Federal Office for Information Security have made the building as eavesdrop-proof as possible. At ten in the morning Jochen Homann, president of the Federal Network Agency, will open an auction in which the established network operators Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica, together with United Internet subsidiary 1&1 Drillisch, will compete.

At stake is nothing less than the auctioning of short-wave radio frequencies for mobile communications. What sounds technical and dry will allow the successful bidders to build the real-time mobile network of the future: the 5G standard. A global race is under way – and Germany, as an industrial nation, wants to be at the front, networking German-made machinery and marketing Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things worldwide.

From Tuesday a complex procedure begins in which frequencies in the 2.0 to 3.6 gigahertz range will be auctioned. The Federal Network Agency has divided the spectrum into 41 blocks on which the admitted bidders must bid simultaneously. Each block carries a minimum bid of between 1.7 and five million euros. Total minimum bids amount to 104.6 million euros.