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Ofcom have a legal duty to secure optimal use of spectrum. Rather than approaching this on the basis of Ofcom deciding what spectrum is used for and who is best qualified to use it they prefer “the market” to determine who gets to use mobile spectrum bands and are neutral as to its use. […]
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The UK government has called for more pro-investment regulation. A good place to start would be to scrap the market mechanisms that have been used to regulate licensed mobile spectrum for the 3G, 4G and 5G mobile infrastructure up-grades. A book just published shows they have been the exact opposite of “pro-investment”. Their costs have […]
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The crisis in the water industry has put privatisation in the spotlight. It has clearly failed the country and consumers. Opinion is divided on whether the failure is down to privatisation or the failure of “the regulator”. There is a third possibility. The regulators were set into the wrong regulatory framework by parliament for a […]
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There has been a failure of coordination between the government’s 5G strategy and the independent regulator’s “competition and spectrum” regulatory strategies. They have been pulling in opposite directions. At the very time the UK needs to roll out a more expensive high performing wireless infrastructure, the regulator has been sucking excessive oxygen out of the UK’s infrastructure investment capacity.
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One of the hardest things to do is to reverse the habits of a lifetime. The mobile industry, with the support of governments and national regulators, has spent almost its entire lifetime looking upwards to the next higher band in the spectrum to continue its success story. But that path is no longer sustainable. The spectrum capacity for the next big wireless network upgrading will have to come by making more efficient use of the mid and low mobile bands.
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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
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