He Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation has decided which company will be in charge of broadband expansion to all rural areas. It will be Hispasat, as established in the resolution of the call for aid to guarantee access to the broadband connection that had been called.
This resolution, which is provisional for now, offers aid to the company selected for the extension of broadband, of a minimum of 100 Mbps, to these areas. In them, the price for the end user will be a flat rate of 35 euros per month, an amount that is set to facilitate the closing of the digital divide in rural and remote areas, as well as in sparsely populated areas of Spain.
Ten applications were submitted to the call, and after examining them, the Evaluation Commission of the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures has decided to grant the aid of the call, of 76.3 million eurosto that company. This will therefore be in charge of deploying the necessary infrastructures to provide broadband connectivity, which it will do through satellite technology, to areas of Spain where there is no fixed technology coverage of a minimum of 50 Mbps.
In addition, Hispasat will be in charge of providing the inhabitants of said areas with an affordable broadband service, at the mentioned price, and with a minimum of 100 Mbps. The provision of this service at the established price will have to be offered until December 31, 2027. Hispasat will also be in charge of paying for the establishment and start-up of a specific platform, as well as the installation of the equipment associated with each registration of the end users of the connection.
The help that Hispasat has received to carry out this task is divided into 40.3 million euros for service configuration and to establish a platform with network resources, and 36 million to cover 100% of the expenses involved in registering end users, up to a maximum of 600 euros per client.
This call has been carried out within the framework of the UNICO program (Universalization of Digital Infrastructures for Cohesion. In addition to this, the UNICO program is designed to facilitate the call for various types of aid. Among them, the aforementioned, which receives the name of UNICO Rural Demandand its purpose is to universalize access to ultra-fast broadband and the extension of 5G networks and connectivity in Spain.
These aids are also designed to facilitate one of the objectives of the Recovery Plan and the Digital Spain 2026 Agenda: that he 100% of the Spanish population has access to broadband Internet. Its call was opened in the middle of last November, and for its concession the commitments to increase the speed of broadband access or the provision of additional services, such as voice over IP, have been assessed. Both operators and groups of companies could present themselves to it, provided that at least one of its members was an operator.
