Vodafone Spain has announced that it will launch commercial 5G services in 15 cities on 15 June. The locations in question have been named as: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Malaga, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Vitoria, San Sebastian, La Coruna, Vigo, Gijon, Pamplona, Logrono and Santander. Vodafone says that it will offer roughly 50% coverage in each of its selected markets at launch, prior to a full rollout.
From launch, Vodafone will offer three 5G-capable smartphones: the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, the LG V50 ThinQ 5G and the My MIX 3 5G from Xiaomi. The cellco adds that customers subscribed to ‘Tarifas Ilimitadas’ (Unlimited Rates) packages can expect to experience download speeds of up to 1Gbps from launch, rising to 2Gbps by the end of the year.
TeleGeography notes that Vodafone dominated the bidding in Spain’s 5G auction in July 2018, paying EUR198.1 million (USD230.9 million) for 18 5MHz blocks of spectrum in the 3.6GHz-3.8GHz band, giving it 90MHz of contiguous spectrum for 5G use.