Spectrum: how the bands of Cyprus are allocated.

The mobile-radio spectrum is a finite natural resource, and the way an island as small as Cyprus allocates its share of that resource between operators tells you almost everything about how the networks actually work. The Department of Electronic Communications publishes a periodic National Frequency Allocation Table, and the 2024 revision lists seven principal bands in commercial mobile use: 700, 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 and 3500 MHz. Each band has its own propagation physics, its own historical allocation, and its own role in the present-day networks.

700 MHz — the rural-coverage band

The 700 MHz band (uplink 703–733, downlink 758–788, paired in the European 2×30 MHz arrangement) was re-allocated from terrestrial broadcasting to mobile use under the European Decision 2017/899/EU. The Cyprus auction was held in March 2020. All three operators acquired a 2×10 MHz block. The band's propagation — long wavelengths, deep building penetration, large cell radius — makes it the principal rural and indoor coverage layer for the 4G and increasingly the 5G layer. A 700 MHz cell at 30 metres above ground will reach, on flat terrain, a useful 4G coverage radius of approximately twelve to fifteen kilometres.

800 MHz — the legacy LTE coverage layer

The 800 MHz band (uplink 832–862, downlink 791–821) was released from the analogue television transition and was auctioned in Cyprus in November 2017. It was the first of the so-called "digital dividend" bands and remains the principal 4G wide-area coverage layer in the rural parts of the island. The three operators hold 2×10 MHz each. The band is now in slow refarming towards 5G dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), although the bulk of the traffic on the band remains LTE in 2026.

900 MHz — the long history

The 900 MHz band — described in note 01 as the original GSM band of the 1995 launch — has been the backbone of the Cyprus mobile coverage for thirty years. Through the period 1995 to 2014 it carried GSM voice and SMS; from 2014 to about 2020 it was a mixed GSM-LTE band under refarming; from 2020 to the present it is primarily LTE, with a small residual GSM allocation maintained for legacy M2M traffic. The technology refarming has happened, on the Cyprus networks, channel by channel — a 200 kHz GSM channel is decommissioned, the spectrum is reallocated to a wider LTE block, the surrounding cells are reconfigured.

1800 MHz — the urban capacity band

The 1800 MHz band (uplink 1710–1785, downlink 1805–1880) was originally allocated to GSM-1800 in the late 1990s to relieve capacity pressure on the 900 MHz layer. From the early 2010s the band has been progressively refarmed for LTE, and is now, on all three operators, primarily an LTE capacity band in the urban areas. The 1800 MHz block is the largest single per-operator allocation on the island — typically 2×20 MHz — and carries the bulk of 4G urban traffic.

2100 MHz — the UMTS heritage

The 2100 MHz band (uplink 1920–1980, downlink 2110–2170) was auctioned in Cyprus in 2003 for UMTS, and was the principal 3G band for the period 2004 to about 2018. From 2018 onwards the band has been refarmed for LTE in line with the broader European 3G shutdown timetable. The 3G service on the Cyprus operators was discontinued progressively through 2022 and 2023; the 2100 MHz band is, in 2026, exclusively LTE.

2600 MHz — the urban 4G dense layer

The 2600 MHz band (uplink 2500–2570, downlink 2620–2690 for the FDD portion, plus 2570–2620 TDD) was auctioned in Cyprus in November 2017 alongside the 800 MHz band. It is the densest urban 4G capacity layer on the island — used for small cells in Nicosia, Limassol, and Larnaca, for indoor systems in the main shopping centres, and for the high-capacity sites that serve the summer coastal traffic.

3500 MHz — the 5G band

The 3500 MHz band (officially the 3.4–3.8 GHz band, ETSI Band n78) was auctioned in Cyprus in December 2020 for 5G. Each operator acquired between 80 and 100 MHz. The band is the principal 5G capacity layer in the urban areas and is described in detail in note 03.

What the spectrum map tells you

Three things, in my reading.

First, the propagation physics organises the band map. The low bands (700, 800, 900) do wide-area coverage; the mid bands (1800, 2100) do mixed coverage and capacity; the high bands (2600, 3500) do urban capacity. This is not a Cyprus particularity — it is the standard European arrangement — but the Cyprus island geometry makes the wide-area role of the low bands more visible than in larger continental networks.

A network is a balance of low-band reach and high-band capacity. The Cyprus operators, each holding a balanced portfolio across the seven bands, run that balance more or less identically — the differences are operational, not spectral.

Second, the historical refarming — GSM out of 900 and 1800, UMTS out of 2100, into LTE everywhere — has reshaped the Cyprus network without any change in the underlying allocations. The band tables of 1995 and 2026 list the same numbers; what runs on them has changed twice over.

Third, the 2020 700 MHz auction was the most consequential single spectrum event of the past decade. It produced, almost overnight, a usable rural 4G coverage layer that the older bands could not on their own sustain at the required quality. The rural coverage maps of 2019 and 2022 are very different documents.

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Researched from the National Frequency Allocation Table (Department of Electronic Communications, 2024 revision), the published auction results of the 2017 and 2020 spectrum auctions, and the ETSI TS 36.101 and TS 38.101 specification documents.