There are many reports that highlight this phenomenon: wealth is concentrated in the big cities and poverty, unfortunately, in the smallest municipalities. In our country, this is the case in three regions: Andalusia, Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha, where 90% of the population works in agriculture and unemployment is high. And this poverty leads to many other problems: permanent population decline, ageing, the land continues to run out, the children leave and forget, etc. So it is a chronic process, a question of poverty or population decline, like the chicken or the egg question that preceded it.
Spread of 5G access
The rollout of 5G access is one of the key projects the EU is working on to mitigate this problem and solve the population problem, which is also predicted to reach 89.5% in rural areas by 2025. To this end, the European Commission has approved a state aid scheme that will allow the large-scale rollout of these networks, especially in rural areas with less than 10,000 inhabitants.
And while important, is this improvement in coverage (rural penetration is expected to increase by 51% from 2018) enough?
My answer is no, we need to achieve high penetration in terms of territory, not population.
why?
The strategic reason is simple: in this respect, we cannot afford even the slightest weakness and must not allow the regions to become a source of opportunity. Because in these regions we have an area of the economy, the agri-food sector, where we are a world leader and benchmark, accounting for 9.7% of our GDP and also the driving force of our tourism sector. And, after all, our daily food is produced in the regions. And, believe it or not, our country still has a deficit in basic production, for example, in cereals. Therefore, we cannot tolerate poor regions that cannot provide their daily food.
Agrotech
This is why 5G is more important than we think – not just for personal connectivity in itself, but also as a source and driver of innovation in the so-called “agrotech”, whose main objective is to increase productivity, introduce robotics and use data in agricultural processes. Agriculture could therefore become the next important scenario for the digital transformation. So let’s look at some examples: advanced greenhouses, precision viticulture, drones – but there are many more.
Fortunately, Spain is a leader in the field of agrotech, with an ecosystem of more than 200 companies. Many technologies are involved here, but especially in the biofood sector, where we are seeing greater and greater interaction with everything related to AI. Here too, 5G plays a key role – not only in the sector itself, but also in the food processing industry in which it is embedded, the so-called ultra-connected smart factories.
That is why I maintain the view that we need to achieve the same widespread 5G deployment in rural areas as we have achieved in urban areas. This may seem “naive”, but the technology already exists to achieve this full 5G coverage in an economically feasible way. For example, the latest developments in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) will enable us to turn, roughly speaking, new satellite coastlines at low altitudes into true 5G-enabled base stations, especially for IoT applications. Commercial deployments will begin soon.
Finally, we have an idyllic vision of the countryside. I often said that once the pandemic is over, there will be a massive return to the countryside thanks to teleworking. But that is not going to happen, at least in the short term. But that is not a problem, because I already know what the magic recipe for this to happen is: 5G and its high penetration in rural areas. Whereas once villages developed beside springs and rivers, now they will thrive beside the new possibilities of 5G.
