The European Commission, the EU’s governing body, has awarded Spanish telecoms company Cellnex £10.5 million (€12m) to deploy 5G infrastructure across the continent.
The planned projects will cover two road corridors connecting Spain to France, from Barcelona to Montpellier and Bilbao to Bordeaux, and another two corridors linking Spain and Portugal, from Salamanca to Vigo and Mérida to Évora.
As part of the European Commission’s Connecting Europe programme, the projects are designed to provide high-quality 5G connectivity for road safety services as well as drivers and passengers along these roads.
Eduardo Fichmann, global director of innovation and product strategy at Cellnex, said: “Cellnex is investing in the benefit that digitalising these road corridors will bring, not only for connected vehicles but also for road network managers, emergency services, logistics and fleet operators as well as passengers themselves.”
Cellnex plans to deploy 34 new sites, including distributed antenna systems, in partnership with mobile operators to achieve this. The sites will use a neutral host model and edge computing nodes to bring 5G connectivity to almost 900 miles of cross-border infrastructure.
As part of the EU’s wider EU Digital Decade strategy, the programme hopes to build a pan-European transport network of 5G corridors by 2027.
Cellnex said that this infrastructure will be a key enabler for tomorrow’s connected and automated mobility and that it will strengthen the digitalisation of rail operations and provide services beyond the transport sector in rural areas along the roads.
The projects will begin in January 2023 with an expected completion date of December 2025.
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