The government is going to oblige all operators that offer Internet services in Spain to offer connections of at least 100 Mb in all the towns of the Spanish territory. This is how it is collected in the new General Telecommunications Lawwhich last week completed its processing process in Parliament and has already been published in the BOE.
The approved Law is not exactly the same as the one that came out of the Senate, but it has a new additional provision that establishes a specific commitment so that high-speed broadband is available in all parts of Spain in June 2023. Before , as stipulated when the law came out of the Senate, the broadband offer with that speed had to be ready for the year 2025, as the Government had set in the Spain Digital 2025 program. But now the date is brought forward almost two years.
The text also states that connections of at least 100 Mbit per second, in the downward direction, will have to be available to any citizen, regardless of where they reside in the Spanish geography. In addition, such connections will have to be offered at an affordable price.
All with the aim of “promoting social and territorial cohesion through the deployment of the most modern telecommunications networks that enable citizens to access the most diverse and necessary services, increasingly basic and essential, which are provided through These networks, like teleworking, telemedicine or online teaching, and thereby strengthen the social and territorial structuring, contributing to the objective of facing the demographic challenge and helping to establish the population in the territory, combating rural depopulation». This is how it appears in the thirtieth additional provision of the law.
Of course, the approved law does not make any reference to the technology that will have to be used to provide access to these lines. It only states that it must support basic and essential services, which may cause some download limitations for some connections due to its nature and technology. Especially in those that are provided through satellite or with 4G and 5G mobile networks.
It is not the only amendment introduced with respect to the original text, since it also includes another one that establishes that customer services that the operators provide they will have to be available, in addition to Spanish, in the rest of the co-official languages of Spain, for when the client requests it. This will force operators to hire customer service personnel who speak Basque, Catalan, Valencian or Galician.
