Italy's Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT) published the official tender notice for the low 26 GHz band — 24.25 to 26.5 GHz — in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on August 26, 2026, formally launching a spectrum auction that had been in the works since AGCOM's Delibera 232/25/CONS set the assignment rules on October 7, 2025. Applications open September 23-25, bidding runs November 2-4, and the spectrum itself won't become usable until January 1, 2029, when existing Wireless Local Loop (WLL) rights in the band expire.
The numbers are modest by Italian spectrum-auction standards. Five national lots of 200 MHz each and 42 regional lots (two per region and autonomous province) carry a combined reserve price of roughly €180 million, according to Telecompaper and TelecomLead. That is a fraction of the €6.55 billion Italy raised in its landmark 2018 auction — and even within that 2018 sale, the analogous high-26 GHz band brought in just €164 million of the total, according to analysis from investment bank Intermonte cited by Corriere Comunicazioni. Millimeter-wave spectrum has always been a volume play, not a scarcity play: short range, high capacity, and useful mainly for dense urban 5G and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) rather than the sweeping rural coverage mid-band spectrum enables.
What the auction gets right
MIMIT's structure shows real learning from 2018, when Italy extracted an eye-watering sum from operators for mid-band and low-band spectrum, only to watch some of that cost pass through to consumers and slow network capex elsewhere. This time, the reserve prices are calibrated to what mmWave spectrum is actually worth — Intermonte's read is that pricing will stay "relatively contained" — and AGCOM has built in flexibility that 2018 lacked: winners can pay in installments and earn discounts on the reserve price for hitting deployment milestones, according to AGCOM's summary of the new rules. That is the right instinct. A regulator's job in a capacity band like this is to get spectrum into use quickly, not to maximize short-term treasury revenue at the expense of investment.
The lot structure also sensibly separates two very different buyer profiles. The five national lots suit mobile network operators — TIM, Fastweb/Vodafone, WindTre, and Iliad — building out dense urban 5G. The 42 regional lots are sized for FWA specialists like Eolo and WindTre's OpNet, who don't need national scale but do need enough spectrum to compete with fiber in the country's broadband-underserved regions. Letting the market sort itself into the right tier, rather than forcing every bidder to compete for the same national blocks, is good auction design.
The case for reserving half the lots — and its risk
The most consequential design choice is quieter: half of the available lots are reserved for operators who already hold WLL rights in the band as of December 31, 2022, according to legal analysis from Studio Legale Sarzana & Associati. There's a genuine case for this. WLL incumbents have already built networks, trained field crews, and signed customers in this band — reassigning their spectrum to a stranger at auction risks stranding sunk investment and disrupting service for existing FWA customers in rural Italy, exactly the population this band is supposed to serve. A clean-slate auction that ignores who's already using the spectrum is not obviously fairer; it's just indifferent to switching costs.
But the risk cuts the other way too. Reserving half the inventory for incumbents narrows the field for new entrants — neutral-host operators, enterprise-network specialists, regional ISPs — who might otherwise bid aggressively and bring fresh capital into rural connectivity. AGCOM's own framework anticipates this tension by requiring scrutiny of bidders' control structures to prevent incumbents from using shell entities to capture reserved lots meant to protect continuity, not just to lock in market position. Whether that scrutiny holds up under commercial pressure between now and the November auction is the detail worth watching, not the headline reserve price.
Coverage obligations carry real teeth
National lot winners must build out and activate service across every province in their license area within 36 months, with annual compliance reporting; failure triggers forfeiture of the license and forfeiture of the winning bid amount, per the same legal analysis. That is a stiffer penalty structure than many EU markets attach to spectrum obligations, and it is defensible: a licensee sitting on unused mmWave spectrum for years, as happened in parts of the 2018 rollout, defeats the entire purpose of assigning it. Coupling flexible payment terms with hard deployment deadlines is a more coherent policy than either alone — pay less if you build fast, lose everything if you don't build at all.
Italy won't raise much money from this auction, and that's fine — that was never really the point of high-frequency mmWave spectrum. The real test is whether 47 lots, a 36-month clock, and a 50% incumbent carve-out actually get low-latency, high-capacity wireless service built out in Italy's FWA-dependent regions by 2029, without quietly freezing out the operators who might have built it faster.