Yesterday the first auction of the 5G contests was defined in Chile when the Telecommunications Undersecretariat held the tiebreaker tender between Wom and Borealnet for the 20MHz block of the 700 MHz band. Both operators had a technical tie in the first instance, and the economic offer settled the issue: Wom's was the highest, with US$82.5 million, a record figure in spectrum in Chile. The Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hutt, stressed that Wom's investment is compounded by the amount that it will disburse to deploy the social considerations -antennas for rural internet- which implies an extra US$56 million, which will benefit 366 towns and 199 hospitals.

After the resolution of the Public Tender for the 20 MHz block of the 700 MHz band, which is added to the award of the 26 GHz band, it would only be necessary to resolve in the next few days the tiebreaker tender for the blocks of the bands AWS (Thursday, February 11) and 3.5 GHz (Tuesday, February 16).

According to Subtel, with the help of 5G, Chile will fully enter the digital society and it is estimated that its deployment will allow the local economy to reactivate after the pandemic with investments of over US$3 billion, which will generate between 6,000 and 10,000 new Job positions.