UK parliamentarians call on cellcos to stop bickering
Report wants tougher action to extend mobile broadband coverage to rural areas and to kick off the LTE auction
Published: 6 November, 2011
READ MORE: Spectrum | UK | Broadband | LTE
UK parliamentarians are growing restive at the repeated delays to the country's 4G spectrum auctions, which they claims are putting universal broadband programs in jeopardy.
A report by the House of Commons' culture media and sport committee calls on mobile operators to step up their efforts to fill in the rural gaps in 3G coverage, or 'notspots', and to stop allowing their "squabbling" to delay auctions.
The committee's members of parliament also want regulator Ofcom to be far tougher in insisting that 4G broadband coverage targets should be conditions of gaining 4G spectrum, especially in the 800MHz digital dividend band, which is particularly suitable for rural networks. Such rules have already been implemented in other large European economies such as Germany, which have overtaken the UK in selling off their 800MHz and 2.6GHz licences for LTE. The committee proposes that at least one new licence holder should be required to provide mobile broadband for 98% of the population - up from the current requirement of 95%.
Last week Ofcom itself launched a report which identified the areas which need infrastructure investment in order to support broadband access. It found that household coverage was far better than geographic coverage because cellcos target the maximum number of homes and businesses. Its coverage map shows that 73% of premises are covered by 3G services from all four cellcos, but only 13% of the UK's landmass. There are 7.7m premises with 3G signals from only some of the operators, or none, while the Highlands of Scotland and mid-Wales have the lowest 3G coverage.
The government has earmarked £150m to invest in addressing notspots and there are several carrier trials of LTE in the low frequency bands. Recently Vodafone said it was seeking 12 communities to participate in rural mobile broadband coverage trials using femtocells, working with Alcatel-Lucent.
But despite all these good intentions, the cellcos continue to argue about how sub-1GHz spectrum is allocated. Uniquely in Europe, only two operators (Vodafone and O2) had GSM licences in the 900MHz band, with Orange and T-Mobile (now Everything Everywhere) running 2G services in 1.8GHz. EE argues that its two rivals should be capped in terms of the total amount of sub-1GHz spectrum they can have, because of its strong propagation qualities - that would mean EE getting access to more of the new 800MHz frequencies, which Vodafone and O2 argue will be superior to 900MHz because they will be a more globally adopted band for LTE, supporting a larger ecosystem.
These disputes have been a stumbling block to getting the auction kicked off and the new committee report criticizes operators for allowing these delays. "We believe that the basic rules for the auction which Ofcom has laid down are sensible and fair, and that further delays will result in the UK falling further behind in this vital area. The auction needs to proceed as soon as possible," chair of the committee John Whittingdale MP told the BBC.
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