Reviewing the data from the CNMC’s annual report, we can see a completely abnormal situation in the telecommunications sector in Spain. Never before has an operator cut its mobile network. Until now, that MásMóvil does not stop dwindling.
The yellow operator has made fairly moderate progress since it acquired Yoigo’s infrastructure, but it has lower results than in 2021 in both 4G and 5G.
Less antennas in MásMóvil
MásMóvil, according to data from the National Commission for Markets and Competition, presents a truly anomalous situation within the telecom sector in Spain. The yellow operator, the fourth in importance right now waiting to merge with Orange, has cut its mobile network both in 4G and – even stranger – in 5G.
According to official figures, MásMóvil ended 2022 with 372 fewer 4G nodes. In comparison, the rest of the competitors increased them: Vodafone added 1,580, Orange 882 and Movistar 714. It must be taken into account that in addition to the year-on-year decrease, when MásMóvil bought Yoigo in 2016, its network had 4,474 base stations, so the increase in all these years it has only been about a thousand more.
Sources from MásMóvil point out to the newspaper Expansión that the cut is due to the strong increase in the 5G graph, since their clients demand more 5G services than 4G and therefore the cut could be due to the fact that the nodes that have been dismantled had become less profitable. due to the change in the traffic behaviors of its customers. However, this is not exactly the case either, since the growth of its fifth generation networks has been practically non-existent in quantity and from 133 own antennas a few months ago it currently has 110 according to Mobile Antennas.
The key to understanding this decline is that MásMóvil has never intended to cover the entire national territory, but to cover a high percentage of the population, so it focuses its efforts and investments on large cities. Already in Yoigo’s time, to provide service to its customers in the rest of the country, it reached roaming agreements, first with Movistar and then from the end of 2016 -once acquired by MásMóvil- with Orange (they have a single joint network in all municipalities with less than 175,000 inhabitants).
According to the data provided when they announced compatibility with the fifth generation of mobile networks in February, the 5G coverage of the MásMóvil Group reaches 74% of the Spanish population and is already present in 1,660 towns in the provinces of Albacete, Álava, Alicante, Almería , Asturias, Ávila, Badajoz, Balearic Islands, Barcelona, Bizkaia, Burgos, Castellón, Cáceres, Cádiz, Cantabria, Ceuta, Córdoba, Cuenca, Ciudad Real, A Coruña, Gipuzkoa, Granada, Girona, Guadalajara, Huelva, Huesca, Jaén, León, Lleida, Lugo, Madrid, Málaga, Melilla, Murcia, Navarra, Ourense, Palencia, Las Palmas, Pontevedra, La Rioja, Salamanca, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Segovia, Seville, Soria, Tarragona, Toledo, Valencia, Valladolid, Zamora and Zaragoza.
Renting is more profitable
The operator only has 5G on the 3.5 GHz band and has no frequencies on the 700 MHz band, the other 5G-enabled one. Nor did it attend the auction for the 26 GHz frequency so as not to make the frequencies more expensive for Orange, with whom it is finalizing its merger agreement, which is awaiting authorization from the European Union.
Most likely, it has been calculated that it is more profitable for you to use Orange’s wholesale network than to continue to maintain your own nodes. Total… soon they will have availability of the orange network. In addition, both Yoigo’s frequencies and infrastructures will most likely be part of the remedies that Brussels will force to sell to authorize the operation, so this could explain why all those antennas have been set aside in recent times, coinciding with the attempt to fusion.
