Stephen Temple

An eye witness account of what went wrong and then what went right for 5G

An unprecidented insight into how to successfully improve national digital telecommunications infrastructures. It brings to life industrial policy and the crucial interaction between business leaders, civil servants, regulators and ministers.

This report is a quality piece of work that understates its potential impact. Buried in the report are two big ideas that, taken together, are great news for rural Britain. For the first time in Britain’s history we may have more advanced broadband connectivity in some of our villages a decade from now than in the suburbs of our cities.

If the industry had gone to the 5G auction seeking an equal share of the spectrum they would have paid £30m. Instead they paid £1.16 billion. Yet despite this record sum, nobody emerged with the amount of 5G spectrum they wanted. Ofcom auction design has made “incremental bandwidth” exceedingly expensive in the UK. The industry need to think long and hard on how they adjust their strategies to reduce the price they pay for incremental bandwidth. If next year’s auction of 3.8 GHz spectrum fetches a similar amount, the money spent on 5G spectrum alone would have funded 100,000 5G small cells. That is not a route to 5G profitability nor of UK leadership in 5G

The mobile world has spent the past 7 years finding solutions to the capacity crunch. A range of new technology and spectrum bands are on their way. The new intellectual challenge for the next 7 years will be a “coverage crunch”. It has become a three layered problem. There is the basic layer of simply getting a signal. This has been getting worse in recent times. A new layer of the coverage problem is the “coverage of capacity”. The third layer is the “coverage of dependable connectivity”and reflect how our digital life has become more essential. It is now time for the mobile community to resolve to find solutions for the coming “coverage crunch” with the same energy that they have been successfully applying to the “capacity crunch”.

The battle lines are drawn between the broadcasting and mobile radio industries over the future of the precious UHF spectrum. The mobile industry case appears to be winning. But there are clear dangers in overlooking important issues that may well come back and cause an upset later. One of those issues is the long term future of free-to-air public service TV broadcasting in a wireless broadband Internet age.

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?

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

Vodafone has being buying cable TV assets in several European countries and in France the cable TV group Altice has bought the French mobile operator SFR. Delivering TV programmes to a TV set appears to have nothing in common with delivering a telephone call to a mobile. So what is the commercial or strategic logic of a mobile network operator getting together with a cable TV network operator?

People may have forgotten the film “All the President’s Men” starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redgrave but everyone knows the expression coined in that film…that if you want to find the answer “follow the money”. The answer we want to know today, as we set our research objectives for 5G, is what the market drivers are going to be for 5G. We need to finish with a globally harmonised technology that mobile network operators (who comprise “the market” for 5G networks) will want to buy.

It was not meant to be. A well respected Cambridge entrepreneurial innovator had a dream of Ofcom taking one of the 2.6 GHz channels to be auctioned for general mobile network use and instead making it widely available for a new generation of low power indoor femto-cells

For the past 30 years politicians, regulators and officials have led simple lives. No matter what the problem…privatisation, competition and free markets have been the answer. Take the specific case of competition. It has become an act of faith that more competition is always a good thing. But has this been true in every case? The Electricity market is a good case study where competition delivers considerably less than we are led to believe..