Germany's 5G spectrum regime is in the middle of an uncomfortable reset. The Federal Administrative Court has confirmed that the country's landmark 2019 spectrum auction — which generated €6.55 billion and handed frequencies in the 2 GHz and 3.6 GHz bands to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefónica, and 1&1 Drillisch — was conducted unlawfully. The Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA), Germany's Federal Network Agency, restarted the entire frequency award proceedings in December 2025. What the court found, and what BNetzA is now being forced to correct, offers a useful lesson in how spectrum design choices ripple into competition and coverage for years afterward.
What the Court Actually Found
The case originated with complaints from EWE Tel and Freenet, two smaller telecommunications companies that participated in or sought access from the 2019 auction. Their core argument: BNetzA set auction rules that failed to require the winning operators to open their networks to service providers — mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) — on fair terms. Without a clear "service provider obligation," the smaller players had no enforceable right to lease capacity from the infrastructure winners, weakening their negotiating position and, by extension, retail competition.
The Administrative Court of Cologne ruled in August 2024 that BNetzA's conditions were established unlawfully, and went further: the judges identified "clear indications of government influence" on the regulator's decision-making — specifically, that the Federal Ministry of Transport had exerted improper pressure on the agency when it was designing the auction framework. This finding strikes at regulatory independence, the structural bedrock of spectrum policy. When BNetzA appealed, the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the appeal, making the Cologne ruling legally binding.
This matters not just as a legal technicality. Regulatory capture — even of the mild "ministerial influence" variety — produces policy that serves powerful incumbents rather than competition. The 2019 framework's omission of MVNO obligations was not an accident: it was the predictable output of a design process in which service providers had little leverage and large operators had significant access to ministry officials.
BNetzA's Restart and the June 2026 Reporting Requirement
BNetzA formally reopened proceedings on December 1, 2025, launching a written stakeholder consultation that closed January 12, 2026. The agency now faces two paths: it can adjust the existing usage rights — potentially through compensatory measures that address the MVNO gap without a full re-run — or it can launch an entirely new auction if the required changes are substantial enough to undermine the original price-finding function. The regulator has signalled it wants to resolve the uncertainty quickly, but no final award decision has been published.
The most concrete recent signal came on June 5, 2026, when BNetzA issued a formal reporting requirement (Berichtspflicht) obligating mobile operators to document and submit their mobile service access negotiations with MVNOs and service providers by July 6, 2026. This is significant: rather than waiting for the proceedings to fully conclude, BNetzA is already gathering evidence on whether operators are negotiating in good faith with service providers. The data collected will directly inform how aggressively the regulator writes the new competition conditions into any revised or re-tendered license terms.
The Parallel Track: Legacy Bands Extended, With Strings
Separately from the 2 GHz and 3.6 GHz proceedings, BNetzA in March 2025 finalised a decision to extend usage rights in the 800 MHz, 1,800 MHz, and 2,600 MHz bands for five years — until the end of 2030 — rather than hold an immediate auction for those expiring licenses. The extension was designed to provide planning certainty to operators while BNetzA develops a comprehensive approach to the entire spectrum portfolio beyond 2030.
But the extension is not a free pass. BNetzA attached meaningful coverage obligations:
- By 2029: at least 99% of households in rural municipalities in each federal state must receive a minimum 100 Mbps mobile data service; all federal roads must be covered at 100 Mbps
- By 2030: at least 99.5% of Germany's total surface area must be covered at 50 Mbps
- By 2030: district roads and inland waterways must meet a 50 Mbps floor
Operators must also negotiate spectrum sharing below 1 GHz with 1&1 Mobilfunk GmbH — the struggling fourth network operator — to help it build out national coverage. The extension is notable precisely because it trades the short-term revenue of a competitive auction for faster rural coverage and measurable competition gains for 1&1.
The Pro-Innovation Case for Getting This Right
Critics of the BNetzA extension model — Telefónica's CEO has described MVNO access mandates as "over-regulation in a demonstrably competitive cellular market" — have a point worth engaging. Mandated access can, in theory, suppress infrastructure investment by reducing the premium operators can earn on their networks. If service providers can always ride others' infrastructure cheaply, the incentive to build new capacity shrinks.
But that argument assumes the retail market is genuinely competitive, and the courts have found otherwise. Where MVNO obligations are absent, the structural result is not a free market but a duopoly or oligopoly with soft price floors — exactly what EWE Tel and Freenet were describing. Requiring operators to negotiate with service providers in good faith, with BNetzA now actively monitoring those negotiations via the June 2026 reporting mandate, is not anti-innovation. It is the prerequisite for the kind of service-level competition that drives retail prices down and forces operators to differentiate on quality rather than market power.
Germany's reset is uncomfortable for an industry that invested €6.55 billion based on rules that turned out to be unlawful. But the lesson for regulators across Europe is clear: spectrum auctions designed under ministerial influence, without enforceable MVNO obligations, are legally fragile and competitively hollow. Writing those obligations clearly at the outset is far less costly than a decade of litigation and a full regulatory do-over.