In a licensing framework published in January 2026, ComReg confirmed it will open the 3.8-4.2GHz radio spectrum band for dedicated private mobile networks, with the licensing process expected to launch in Q4 2026. The target users are not telecom operators but the enterprises that increasingly want their own wireless infrastructure: manufacturers, ports, airports, hospitals and warehouses that need dense, low-latency connectivity for industrial IoT sensors, autonomous guided vehicles and machine-vision quality control, without routing that traffic through a public mobile network.
A Deadline Ireland Set Through Brussels, Not Dublin
The timing is not really ComReg's to choose. Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/2425, adopted 2 December 2025, requires every EU member state to "designate and make available on a non-exclusive basis the 3 800-4 200 MHz frequency band" for wireless broadband low/medium-power (WBB LMP) systems by 30 September 2026. That is a full 400MHz of spectrum — a wide slice by mobile standards — earmarked EU-wide specifically for private, local-area networks rather than public carriers. ComReg's own consultation record on a licensing regime for private mobile radio and WBB LMP systems, published 27 January 2026, shows the domestic groundwork was already under way well before July's announcement.
Read against that deadline, ComReg's Q4 2026 target is less a proactive industrial policy and more a compliance schedule with the paint still wet. A licensing process launching in the fourth quarter is not the same as the band being fully available to applicants — and the gap between "designated" and "usable by a factory floor" is where enterprises actually feel friction. Ireland is not late by the letter of the Commission's decision, but it is not early either.
Ireland Is Behind Its Neighbours, Not Ahead of Them
The more useful comparison is not to the EU floor but to peer regulators moving on the same band. France's Arcep has already moved past pilot authorisations: it now issues ten-year licences in the 3.8-4.2GHz band, in blocks of up to 100MHz, subject to annual government-set fees. Poland's UKE, by contrast, only opened consultation on splitting the band between local government and business users this year — putting Ireland roughly in the middle of the European pack, ahead of consultation-stage regulators but behind states already issuing long-duration commercial licences.
That gap matters commercially. A factory or hospital deciding whether to invest capital in a private 5G build-out needs licence security measured in years, not a pilot programme it might have to unwind. ComReg's Test and Trial route lets organisations experiment ahead of the Q4 launch, which is sensible bridging policy — but it is not a substitute for the kind of decade-long licence France already offers, and multinationals weighing where to site a new private-network deployment will notice the difference.
The Case for Caution, Stated Fairly
Before dismissing the slower pace as pure bureaucratic drag, it's worth stating the regulator's strongest argument plainly: spectrum in this range sits near bands used for satellite and aeronautical services, and the EU's own roadmap for the adjacent 3.4-3.8GHz and 3.8-4.2GHz bands explicitly builds in coexistence measures on the aviation side. Getting interference management wrong here is not a hypothetical risk — the US rollout of C-band 5G collided messily with radio-altimeter safety concerns in 2021-22, delaying deployments and forcing last-minute mitigation near airports. A regulator that takes an extra two quarters to get technical sharing conditions right, rather than rushing licences into a band with unresolved coexistence questions, is making a defensible trade-off, not merely a cautious one.
Why Proportionate Still Beats Precautionary
That said, the sharing studies underpinning the EU decision were conducted by CEPT specifically to resolve those coexistence questions before the harmonisation decision was adopted — the technical clearing work is largely done. What is left for ComReg is administrative: publish the licence terms, set the fee structure, and open applications. Stretching that into a fourth-quarter target, when France has run a live licensing regime for months, risks Irish manufacturers and hospitals losing the first-mover advantage in an area — private industrial 5G — where deployment costs have fallen to roughly parity with Wi-Fi 7 in comparable use cases, making speed to licence a genuine competitiveness variable, not a formality.
The better test of whether ComReg gets this right won't be whether it hits Q4 2026 — the EU deadline effectively guarantees that — but whether the licences it issues look more like France's ten-year commercial grants than a rolling extension of the Test and Trial scheme. Ireland's manufacturing and logistics sectors have real, immediate use cases for this spectrum. A licensing regime that treats them as pilot participants rather than paying customers with multi-year investment horizons will have technically complied with Brussels while still leaving Irish industry a step behind its continental competitors.