Georgia took three auctions and five years to get 5G to all three operators

5G became available to subscribers of all three Georgian mobile operators in 2025, the chairman of the Communications Commission, Goga Gulordava, told Parliament, the commission said in a statement of 22 September.

He was presenting the regulator's 2025 activity report. It took three auctions over three years to reach that point, after the regulator began work on 5G in 2020, the announcement of the third auction says. The record shows how one condition in the auction design, an obligation to give mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) wholesale access, shaped who bought spectrum and when.

The 5G record, step by step

Method: every row comes from one of four ComCom releases, dated 17 August 2023, 24 May 2025, 27 June 2025 and 22 September 2026, linked in the Source column. The bands and price of the 2024 auction are not given in the cited ComCom releases; they are discussed below from a press report and are not in the table.

What the MVNO condition did

In 2023 the commission required winners of all four combined lots to open their networks to MVNOs in return for additional discounts, its release on the first auction says. Magticom and Silknet raised concerns about the terms, and the commission agreed to offer one combined and two separate lots without that duty. The two operators, which the release says hold a combined share of more than 70 per cent of the Georgian telecom market, still declined to take part. Cellfie Mobile was the only bidder. It won combined lot N2, covering the 700 MHz and 3400-3600 MHz ranges, and accepted the MVNO obligation, which brought its fee down by 20 per cent to GEL 2,657,445. The release gave it one month to obtain a licence and pay 30 per cent of the fee.

After that auction the mandatory MVNO requirement was removed, the May 2025 announcement says, for two reasons. ComCom's holistic study of the sector had designated Magticom an operator with significant market power and imposed an MVNO access obligation on it, and Cellfie Mobile had already accepted the duty in 2023. By the third auction the condition was optional and worth a 20 per cent discount on the initial fee. Magticom was the only participant in the second auction in 2024. In the third, Silknet won combined lot N1 for GEL 48,802,257 and bought it without the MVNO duty, the commission's result notice shows. On the regulator's own account, two of the three operators now carry an MVNO access obligation, one through its licence and one through its market-power designation.

The third auction also limited who could bid for its nine separate lots to winners of at least one combined lot and companies already licensed for frequencies in the combined lots, the announcement says. The two combined lots were abstract lots, identical in bands, coverage obligations and price, which left the optional access duty as the main choice a bidder faced for them.

What the prices do and do not show

The headline sums are far apart. Cellfie's fee would have been about GEL 3.32 million before its discount, a Corridor Signal calculation from the 2023 release. Silknet's lot cost GEL 48,802,257, with 30 per cent due before the licence is issued and 70 per cent within a year, ComCom said. For the 2024 round, Georgia Today reported that Magticom obtained rights to the 700, 800 and 3410-3710 MHz bands for 15 years at a cost of GEL 77,125,735, also on a 30 per cent and 70 per cent schedule.

Those figures cannot be compared per megahertz. The ComCom releases name the frequency ranges in each combined lot but not the bandwidth assigned, and the packages differ by band and date. What the record does show is the sequence of entry: the operator outside the two largest came first, with an access duty, and the two largest followed only after the duty stopped being mandatory.

The coverage duties now set the timetable. Winners of the 2025 auction must gradually cover densely populated settlements, tourist areas, ports, airports, railway stations and main highways over seven years and build to European Union technical norms, the May 2025 announcement says, which places the end of that schedule in the early 2030s. The releases do not publish the interim milestones; the commission said the full terms were on its website.