5G Forum marks a milestone with the announcement in Seville of the deployment of the first 5G Advanced network in Spain

• Meinrad Spenger, CEO of MasOrange, was ‘Speaker of Honor’ of the eighth edition and announced during the opening day the deployment from the Cartuja Auditorium of the first 5.5G network in Spain, and that they will invest 700 million euros in Andalusia.
• Joaquín Segovia, General Manager of Telefónica’s Southern Territory, indicated that the Spanish company will create 4,123 new sites to reach 30,000 kilometers of roads and towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants with the 5G network.
• Matías González, secretary general of Telecommunications, Digital Infrastructure and Digital Security of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, pointed out that the government has earmarked more than 1 billion for the development of 5G technology in complex business areas, transport corridors or the implementation of 5G in rural areas, among others.
• The Cartuja Auditorium -managed by Yventu- will host the three face-to-face sessions from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 May. Subsequently, the final two days will be held in online format on Thursday May 15 and Friday May 16.

The 5G Forum kicked off on Monday, May 12. Until the 16th, Seville becomes the national capital of innovation and 5G technology. The Cartuja Auditorium -managed by Yventu-, located in the Cartuja Science and Technology Park, hosted the first of three face-to-face sessions that will continue until Wednesday 14, while on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 the two virtual sessions will be held in online format.

Meinrad Spenger, CEO of MasOrange, was the ‘Speaker of Honor’ of the opening day. He shared his vision on the impact of 5G on digital transformation and the technologies that his company is driving, especially in intelligent and automated systems. Spenger announced in premiere the deployment from the Cartuja Auditorium of the first 5G Advanced network in Spain coinciding with the celebration of the 5G Forum “with a peak speed of 10Gbs, multiplying by five the 5G speed and minimizing latency, while consuming less energy in mobiles and allowing devices to work better”.

The CEO of MasOrange warned that 5G Advanced will be the prelude to 6G and assured that “multiplying the average connection speed will increase national GDP by one percentage point”. At a regional level, Meinrad Spenger announced the “investment of 700 million euros in Andalusia over the next three years” in a clear commitment to the implementation of this technology to which he also added the importance of working in other areas such as cybersecurity, sustainability and Artificial Intelligence: “Companies that do not advance in these aspects, are going to have problems to succeed in the future”.

Javier Olveira, Director of B2B Customer Engineering at MasOrange, addressed the role of 5G in improving operational efficiency and business service quality. “Anywhere connectivity is already a critical need for enterprises,” said Olveira, who highlighted “5G SA as a new and complete alternative to cover this need efficiently and with the best quality.” He also spoke of the 5G LAN, the alternative to the traditional workstation that unifies, in the 5G network, public mobile telephony and the private enterprise network for greater “operational efficiency and quality of service”.

Joaquín Segovia, General Manager of Telefónica’s Southern Territory, was interviewed during the institutional block of the opening day, in which he spoke about the advances being presented around 5G technology at the company. “This country should be proud of the excellent 5G infrastructures it has,” he said, noting that Telefónica already reaches -according to data from March 2025- 92.8% of 5G coverage nationwide. Figures that position Telefónica as “our country’s 5G leader”.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence, he assured that “it is a tool that gives us a plus and makes us more competitive and efficient” within the industry and is used to advance in the digital transformation that the company seeks, especially in rural and depopulated areas, where much of the work and innovation that is developed in the sector is focused. “The UNICO Plan is going to allow us to create 4,123 new sites to cover 30,000 kilometers of road and populations of less than 10,000 inhabitants“.

DIGI, an operator headquartered in Bucharest (Romania), participated for the first time in the 5G Forum in Seville, joining the important list of participating operators. Ismael Serrano, CTO of DIGI Spain, showed the company’s determined and firm commitment to the customer in Spain, where it has become the fourth operator with 6 million mobile lines and 2 million fiber lines with an investment of more than 349 million euros. “We have gone from being a virtual operator to a mobile operator, an important milestone for the company,” said Ismael Serrano, before announcing that “in the second half of 2025 we will begin to activate our antennas to offer our own service.

Important institutional support

The eighth edition of the 5G Forum was attended by the Government of Spain and the City of Seville, highlighting the presence on the opening day of Alvaro Pimentel, deputy mayor of Seville, who welcomed the Andalusian capital, home of the 5G Forum, “event, he said, which places Seville in the nerve center of technological innovation. “It is very important what will be discussed here because technologies that seem the future, are already in our daily lives,” said Pimentel before claiming the “commitment of the City of Seville to continue promoting such events.”

The 5G Forum was once again attended by several representatives of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Administration. Among them, Matías González, Secretary General for Telecommunications, Digital Infrastructure and Digital Security, who reiterated the “commitment of the Government of Spain to the deployment of 5G technology” to continue with the “public-private collaboration that we have been enjoying in our country successfully so that 5G can be a lever for transformation and development at a national level”.

As an example of this, the Government has allocated more than 1,000 million for the development of 5G technology in complex business areas, transport corridors or the implementation of 5G in rural areas, among others. “5G is the first technology that is going to provide capabilities in productive environments, industries and specific sectors such as transport and defense,” said Matías González, who already sees the arrival of 6G very close, in whose research 175 million euros have been invested in recent years.

Julia Criado, deputy director general of Radio Spectrum Planning and Management, opened the opening day’s presentations with the ‘map of 5G in Spain in 2025’ that is mainly focused on “reducing the digital divide of 5G technology”. “Our goal is to bring standalone 5G to rural areas, implementing additional measures in a public-private collaboration framework, as well as achieving a massive deployment so that the industry in each sector is ‘modernized’,” said Julia Criado, who also anticipated that “Spain will be very involved in the development tasks to advance the deployment of Advanced 5G and the future 6G at European level.”

Luis Pérez, general manager of the Cartuja Science and Technology Park, welcomed the Cartuja Auditorium and praised a PCT that hosts all kinds of fundamental events for the technological development of the city and the region. “The PCT is a successful project with 600 companies, 30,000 employees and 10,000 students with a turnover of 4,850 million euros, a figure that puts us in first place nationally,” he said.

AI and Advanced 5G, the backbone of the future

Fernando de la Cruz, chief architect of wireless solutions at Huawei, shared the vision of the future from the perspective of the world’s leading Chinese multinational in information and communication technology infrastructure and telecommunications equipment. “From Huawei we foresee that in 2030 there will be 100 billion mobile connections, one million times the traffic currently generated in Spain,” he said.

Cristina Peñas, commercial director of Axion, moderated the panel ‘5G at Axion: Our customers’ experience and preparing for 6G’, in which Marcos Estopiñan, head of Digital Marketing and Innovation at Carmila, spoke about the role of 5G for indoor coverage: “We conceive 5G technology not only as a technology, but as a tool to improve the customer experience through coverage”. Javier Reina, University Professor at the University of Seville, highlighted the “importance of public-private collaboration” in the development of 5G technology and cited some success stories in which the University has worked in connected health.

Pedro Espina, technical director of RTVA, put on the table the new National Technical Plan TDT that will allow the implementation of Ultra High Definition in DTT, although he stressed the “need to work on 5G Broadcast pilots”, the future to deliver high quality content through OTT platforms. Antonio Emilio Muñoz, Telecommunications Engineer at 112 Andalucía, explained how emergency management has evolved thanks to 5G technology and introduced the concept of ‘5G Bubble’, “a solution for rural locations that provides 5G connectivity with indoor communication to continue managing the emergency as if we were in an environment with normal 5G coverage”.

José Luis Alcolea, head of 5G Strategy at Hispasat, presented the company’s plans to expand satellite connectivity with the IRIS²project, the first LEO 5G-NTN constellation. “It is the most ambitious project in satellite communications that the European Union has with public-private cooperation (60-40) and a total cost of 10.6 billion euros,” he said.

Mariano Garcia, pre-sales director at HPE Aruba Networking, shared complementary connectivity solutions combining 5G private networks and WiFi networks. “We provide massive connectivity in crowded events, university campuses and airports, among other use cases, with a combination of 5G private network and WiFi networks,” he said.

Raúl Maldonado, corporate director and people at Circet Spain, spoke about infrastructure as a key to competitiveness and differentiation in 5G technology. “Without infrastructure, there is no connectivity,” warned Maldonado, for whom “the intensive use of 5G forces us to rethink the evolution of infrastructure because technologically there are many advances, but we have to get them to the user in some way.”

Belén Lanuza, general manager at DIHBU 4.0, spoke about POLEA LAB, “a pioneering project for scaling solutions”. The project, which has recently been launched and will be active until the end of 2026 with the prospect of continuity, seeks to close the gap between technological development and industrialization by enabling infrastructures that allow testing in environments similar to real ones.

Jaime Ruiz, Director of Innovation at Nokia, shared use cases and examples of Digital Twins applied to immersive tele-education, as well as examples of use cases of AI integrated in Digital Twins to detect people from autonomous vehicles, among others.

Gabriel R. Gonzálvez, CEO of Opossum Studios, explained the success of this micro-mini company that has managed to stand out in a highly competitive market thanks to its 3D virtual tour solutions. “We remain committed to helping companies and organizations transform their industries through immersive technology,” he stressed.

Mª Eugenia Taillefer, director of AI Funded, closed the sessions of the opening day with use cases of a port chatbot and an educational chatbot developed by her company, thanks to which “we automate processes and make them more agile for people on a continuous basis”.

Exhibition area with demonstrations

The event will have an exhibition area during the on-site sessions at the Cartuja Auditorium from May 12 to 14. MasOrange pioneered the deployment of a 5.5G Advance network with higher capacity, lower latency, immersive communications, massive connectivity and more intelligent and integrated ground-orbit networks. Telefónica has three demonstrations that bring technological innovation closer to everyday life: an exhibition drone, virtual reality glasses combined with a smart helmet, and a Xiaomi robot.

Secmotic presented Seclive, a solution designed to improve safety at work through the use of computer vision and technology. Vicomtech has in its exhibition area several examples of immersive experiences that combine 3D video and extended reality (XR) technologies as a sample of what will be possible with the mobile networks of the future, among others. During these days, Wavecontrol is exhibiting MonitEM-IoT, a solution that allows exhaustive control of human exposure to electromagnetic fields, ensuring that technological advances do not have an impact on public safety.

SAPEC shows during the edition how it is possible to deploy a 5G private network in less than twenty minutes, as well as the configuration and management of the same. TESLA is offering the chance to enjoy several smart cars and live the experience of driving them on a closed circuit. There will also be exclusive demonstrations by leading companies such as GMV, Gradiant, OpenNebula, Ayscom, Teltronic, Axion, Nokia, Rohde & Schwarz, Kenmei and AIFunded, as well as the University of Malaga and ‘El Observatorio’ of Medina Media Events.

Successful participation

A total of 87 speakers, 40% of whom are women, will talk about innovation, projects and 5G deployment both in Spain and internationally. European, American and Asian experts and leaders will present the latest in 5G technology, Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity, and discuss when the next generation of mobile telephony will arrive: 6G.

Telephony operators, technology multinationals, institutions, local, regional and national administrations, organizations, universities and leading companies in the telecommunications sector, totaling 70 entities from the national and international scene, make up a top-level agenda. Participants include the country’s main operators -MasOrange, Telefónica, DIGI and Vodafone- together with other leading multinationals in the sector.

All conferences are available for on-demand viewing through ‘The Observatory’, the digital platform of Medina Media Events, where each conference will be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, free of charge.

The eighth edition of the 5G Forum is organized by Medina Media Events and has the support of Orange, Telefónica, DIGI, Netmetrix, Huawei, ZTE, GMV, NTT DATA, HPE – Aruba Networking, Vicomtech, Gradiant, i2CAT, OpenNebula, Ayscom, Keysight, Teltronic, Datatronics, Oracle, University of Málaga, Axión, Wavecontrol, Nokia, Rohde & Schwarz, Hispasat, Circet, Iplus|F, Dihbu, SAPEC, Gsertel, Kenmei, Ingenalia, AIFunded, Opossum, AEVAC and Secmo Schwarz, Hispasat, Circet, Iplus|F, Dihbu, SAPEC, Gsertel, Kenmei, Ingenalia, AIFunded, Opossum, AEVAC and Secmotic, among others.

Today, second day of the 5G Forum

This Tuesday 13 May the second face-to-face conference will be held in the Cartuja Auditorium – managed by Yventu – with the participation of a total of twenty speakers from leading national and international companies in the sector and universities. Telefónica, Netmetrix, NTT DATA, GMV, Wavecontrol, Vicomtech, Gradiant, i2CAT, OpenNebula, Teltronic, Datatronics, Ayscom and Keysight, as well as the University of Málaga and the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) will be talking about groundbreaking projects that are revolutionizing the sector and 5G technology.