Finland is the only country that uses the proceeds from these auctions to build one network from which all providers lease.
The rest of the countries milk the auctions as a cash-cow. The cool thing for countries is that they do not have to call this officially a tax on peoples income.
https://www.gsma.com/spectrum/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Imp...
It's fairly recent (last few years) for communities to realize that cell phone coverage is just as bad as it really is.
Until then communities were asking for better landline service, where "talk to the hand" was and still is the mantra. In the case of cell phone service people didn't bother asking because they figured "cell phone companies say they serve 300M POPs" and that if their cell phone didn't work in some places they'd assume that it was something about them personally or their specific phone.
Once they tried giving grants to improve service in places that didn't have it, then they found they couldn't find coverage holes on the carrier maps, but could find them reliably on the ground -- so the scandal that "cell phone carrier maps are completely wrong" is just starting to develop.