Brazil’s communications minister Paulo Bernardo said last week that he expects this year’s auction of 700MHz band 4G mobile licenses to go ahead by ‘the end of August or the first week of September,’ remaining in line with the government’s previous rough schedule of August, Telegeography.com reports citing Brazilian news site Zero Hora.

The minister said that the auction plan had already been passed to the state auditor, Tribunal de Contas da Uniao (TCU), which is expected to take 30 days to review and approve the text. If there are no objections to it, the preparations for the auction should take another month, he added.

Earlier last week the ministry finalized the schedule for shutting down analogue TV signals and freeing up the 4G 700MHz band across Brazil, which, following a pilot phase, begins in major cities in April 2016 and will see the 4G frequencies available in areas representing around 60 percent of the population by the end of 2017, and the entire country by November 2018.