The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has fixed the reserve price for the auction of the fifth generation (5G) spectrum at N75 billion ($197.4 million), noting the exercise will take place on December 13, 2021.

The NCC, which explained in detail to a group of the telecommunications stakeholders in Lagos, also gave timelines, strategy and comments of telecommunications operators to the draft information memorandum (IM) for the auction of the 3.5GHz spectrum band, as part of its 5G technology deployment plan.

The commission plans to conduct the 5G spectrum auction with a reserve price starting at $197,400,000 for two lots of 100 MHz on offer in the first phase of the auction in the 3.5GHz band while an Initial Bid Deposit (IBD) equal to 10 per cent of the reserve price will be adopted in line with the previous auction.

The NCC said it plans to use the Ascending Clock Auction which is software based. It said provisions have been made for manual auction should the auction software fail during the auction process.

NCC plans to have a mock auction on December 6, 2021 which shall precede the main auction on December 13, 2021.