The entire world gets what 5G is in an instant…it’s the next mobile revolution to come after 4G. Everyone has bought into the idea that something better must exist beyond 4G without having any idea if it is true and if so, what it is. A lot of ideas have been flying around to fill this vacuum. Many are incoherent and some beyond the fringe of commercial reality. 2015 will be the year when 5G gets real or gets lost.
Read more →BT’s is thinking about buying O2 or EE and the UK mobile industry is driven instantly into M&A war gaming. On the face of it there are dozens of large telcos who could afford to buy a UK mobile operator – so why does BT generate this particularly feverish response? After all it has not shown itself as particularly successful at growing its own mobile MVNO business?
Read more →The Prime Minister has recently discovered what many locals have known for decades. All of the mobile operators have significant rural areas where their coverage ranges from patchy to non-existent. He is uniquely placed to do something about it. Hidden in a haystack of imperfect possibilities maybe the elusive needle that could super-charge UK mobile coverage – and not just in rural areas…
Read more →The UK first introduced its 999 service in 1937. Over the next 75 years telecommunications has been totally transformed but the emergency telephone call has hardly changed. A new IET initiative has called for a complete re-think of the emergency ‘999’ call service and for consideration of an emergency text service. There is a huge opportunity to vastly improve the experience of emergency calls that exploits the amazing technical advances of the past few decades…the IET initiative is a timely wake-up call. We should set high ambitions…it should work right across Europe and why not the world?
Read more →The recent regulatory spot-light has been on the right number of competing mobile network operators in the market on both sides of the Atlantic – where EU and US regulators seem to have arrived at different numbers. What is the right number of competing mobile operators? And is it just a question of getting the right number of competitors and the market will do the rest? EU REgulators are leaving a lot of unanswered questions
Read more →Everyone has to view the rolling out of dense small-cell 5G networks as an operation to be organised on an industrial scale with all the component costs scaled to a mass production of broadband data capacity across cities and towns. The new small cell network economics should only have one thing in common with today’s mobile networks – ”affordable access fees”. This drives an imperative to hold down running costs as the number of cells multiply.
Read more →If we are all to enjoy really high performing mobile networks in the future various forms of spectrum sharing between mobile operators will become essential. Spectrum trading offers the most profitable route to spectrum sharing. But in spite of the enabling legislation being over 10 years old and Ofcom passing the necessary supporting regulations over [...]
Read more →Ofcom are consulting on their proposal for re-allocating the 700 MHz band exclusively for mobile services. They claim it could save the mobile operators £480m-£770m’s worth of new base stations. A much better outcome could be achieved by using the 700 MHz band auction to incentivise the mobile industry towards more base stations not less. [...]
Read more →The Net Neutrality debate has always been as passionate as it has been polarised. Yet there remains a problem to be solved. One set of enterprises, like Netflix and U-Tube, are driving up video traffic across the Internet and another set of enterprises, the ISP’s, are being expected to pick up the extra investment cost to carry their traffic.
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