Weekly Wrap: What’s the business case for 26 GHz?

The UK auctioned 26 GHz months ago, but there is still not a single active 26 GHz base station. In fact, you’ll have a hard time finding a handset anywhere in the country that can use the band.

Rather than criticising regulators for auctioning a band that has not been very useful for mobile operators yet, it is worth asking what 26 GHz is actually good for and why operators still buy it.

26 GHz can provide very high capacity and low latency for indoor hotspots in offices, factories or other venues when dense small cells or repeaters are deployed inside the building. However, indoor mmWave 5G comes at a high cost.

Back in 2019, when testing its 5G hardware in indoor environments, Qualcomm found that for a 27,000 square foot office with just one floor, it would need to deploy 20 mmWave small cells. These would have to be connected to a base station to achieve over 90% coverage. For multi-storey buildings, hardware would have to be installed on every floor.

Operators remain cautious about the ecosystem and use cases. “Use cases remain much less certain, and many applications may be limited to low or no mobility,” Canadian operator Rogers said in response to ISED’s 2025 consultation on awarding the 26 GHz and 38 GHz bands.

Responding to that same consultation, Qualcomm claimed there was already a substantial ecosystem. “There are mmWave-equipped base stations and smart repeaters, and approximately 50 vendors have developed over 160 mmWave consumer devices and modules collectively, including smartphones, customer premises equipment, and laptops,” the company said.

Nokia said that the technology to use this band efficiently does exist, but it is up to each operator how to use it. The company said that some operators have used the band for mmWave fixed wireless access (FWA) to provide high-speed connections to homes and small and medium-sized businesses via outdoor customer equipment with strong antennas.

Nokia referred to several examples of this in Europe. In Italy, Fastweb Air is using 26 GHz for FWA, and Eolo is relying on 28 GHz for hundreds of megabits. In Germany, in spring 2025, Deutsche Telekom (DT) launched hybrid home plans that add fixed wireless capacity “on demand” when customers’ broadband peaks. So far, DT is trialling mmWave FWA and only offers 26 GHz mmWave as part of its private 5G “campus network” offering.

There’s also a growing market for this in Australia. ANBN has deployed 5G mmWave at around 850 of its 2,300 fixed wireless sites, with about 10,000 premises already using mmWave-based FWA.

Do these FWA deployments suggest a viable 26 GHz business case? According to a report from GSMA Intelligence, the cost-effectiveness of mmWave-enabled FWA networks, compared to 3.5 GHz FWA networks, depends on several factors. “The number of sites needed to provide 5G FWA coverage is important,” the report says. “There are also higher costs associated with mmWave equipment. However, the superior throughput and capacity characteristics of mmWave translate into a lower number of base stations needed to fill gaps in downlink and uplink capacity.”

For now, 26 GHz looks more like a specialist indoor and FWA tool than a mainstream mobile band. Operators that already own it may find profitable niche uses, but the mass‑market indoor mobile business case still feels fragile.

Here’s what else PolicyTracker reported on this week:

• We’ve gathered comments from industry experts on the European Commission’s Digital Networks Act proposal
• UK’s regulator Ofcom and the defence ministry recently approved a new spectrum sharing framework
• The North Macedonian regulator has awarded spectrum to a new market entrant
• One industrial region in Argentina cannot offer any more Starlink connections
• Satellite operator SES looks to be in a good position to benefit if the US regulator goes ahead with an auction of spectrum in the upper C-band