On 1 April 2026, Ireland's Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) commenced the final lots — B14 to B17 in the East Region — under Vodafone's 3.6 GHz Band Liberalised Use Licence. With that step, ComReg confirms that no further lots remain to be commenced, and 279 of the original 292 transition service areas (95.5%) have been cancelled, leaving just 13 active. The country's primary mid-band 5G spectrum is now fully and nationally usable by the rights-holders who actually paid for it.
That sentence describes a quiet administrative milestone. It also describes a nine-year gap between selling a public asset and delivering clear title to it — and that gap is the real story for anyone who cares about how fast innovation reaches the ground.
What was actually sold, and when
ComReg published the results of its 3.6 GHz award on 22 May 2017. Five winning bidders — Imagine, Airspan, Vodafone, Three Ireland and Meteor (now part of Eir) — took up all 350 MHz on offer across 594 lots in nine regions, paying in excess of €78 million (€60.5 million upfront plus roughly €17.7 million in usage fees). The licences run 15 years and expire on 31 July 2032.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The band sold in 2017. National clear use arrived in April 2026. The licences expire in July 2032. Buyers paid for 15 years of a band that the regulator has only now fully handed over — meaning a meaningful slice of the paid-for term elapsed before the spectrum could be deployed cleanly everywhere. The 3.6 GHz band is the workhorse of European 5G — high enough for real capacity, low enough to cover a city — and Ireland spent a large share of its licence life clearing it.
The steelman: why the transition was slow on purpose
The delay was not regulatory dithering for its own sake, and it is worth stating the strongest case for ComReg's approach. The 3.6 GHz band was not empty. It carried live fixed-wireless broadband serving real customers — many of them rural households for whom that link was their only viable connection. A hard switch-off would have stranded those users to accelerate 5G for the better-served urban majority. ComReg's transition framework, run through hundreds of discrete service areas with Imagine as the principal incumbent winding down legacy service, was explicitly designed so that existing customers were migrated before each lot was liberalised. Managed continuity for vulnerable rural users is a legitimate proportionality goal, and a regulator that simply evicted them would deserve criticism too.
That case is real. But it does not fully excuse the timeline, and treating a nine-year clearance as a success risks normalising it.
The cost of slow clearance is innovation deferred
Spectrum has no salvage value when it sits unusable. Every year a paid-for band cannot be deployed at full national scale is a year of deferred network investment, deferred capacity for fixed-wireless competitors to challenge fibre incumbents, and deferred returns that operators price into the next auction. ComReg's own later award makes the point: when it published the Multi Band Spectrum Award (MBSA2) results on 14 December 2022 — 470 MHz across the 700 MHz, 2.1, 2.3 and 2.6 GHz bands, raising circa €448 million for the State — it noted that delays to widespread 5G rollout cost the Irish economy on the order of €1 billion per annum, and potentially double that. If a regulator quantifies the cost of delay that precisely, a multi-year clearance of the flagship 5G band is not a rounding error.
The adoption curve shows what was at stake. ComReg's 2025 Mobile Consumer Experience report found 5G adoption in Ireland reached 60%, up from just 17% in 2022 — growth that happened while the 3.6 GHz band was still being cleared region by region. Operators built that uptake on partial access to their own spectrum. The counterfactual — full national clear use years earlier — is precisely the deployment ComReg says is worth roughly €1 billion a year.
The proportionate fix: protect users without freezing the asset
The lesson is not that incumbents should be evicted overnight. It is that consumer protection and spectrum efficiency are not actually in tension if the transition is engineered for speed from day one. Three design choices would have helped: shorter, firmly-dated migration windows set at award rather than negotiated lot-by-lot; funded migration of legacy fixed-wireless customers onto fibre or alternative bands as a condition of the award; and milestone-linked fee rebates that reward fast clearance instead of letting the clock run. The EU's Digital Decade target — all populated areas covered by 5G by 2030 — gives Ireland a hard deadline, and the 2032 licence expiry is closing in. Ireland should not relearn this in the next band.
What completion actually unlocks
Credit where due: the transition is done, cleanly, with rural users carried across rather than cut off, and Vodafone, Three, Eir and Imagine now hold unencumbered national mid-band rights. That is the right end state. Operators can now densify urban 5G and push fixed-wireless access into areas fibre has not reached, sharpening competition against incumbent broadband. The asset is finally working. The open question for ComReg's 2025–2028 spectrum plan is whether the next prime band — almost certainly upper 6 GHz — reaches users in months, not years. Spectrum policy should be judged not by how cleanly a band is eventually cleared, but by how little of its useful life is lost getting there.