Mobile network operators will not be able to roll out 4G LTE services until 2013 at the earliest, due to technical issues, according to UK regulatory body Ofcom, rendering speculation about whether the spectrum auction will be delayed as irrelevant.
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UK regulator Ofcom, has announced that, from June 20th, mobile operators are permitted to trade the rights to spectrum amongst themselves. The new regulation covers 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz spectrum and mean operators will be able to bid for the use of spectrum they believe the have greater need for than other operators.
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The UK arm of Telefónica, O2, has released a statement blasting UK regulator Ofcom’s consultation over the forthcoming digital dividend spectrum auction.
The operator is objecting to the use of spectrum floors, whereby at least four operators will get at least 10MHz of spectrum below 1GHz. However, O2 believe that these spectrum floors amount to a state aid, which would make them illegal under EU law.
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UK mobile broadband users accessing the web over dongles and datacards are getting average throughput of 1.5Mbit/s, according to research released Thursday by UK regulator Ofcom. But there were significant differences between the five carriers’ performance, with O2 delivering the best performance, and Orange the worst. 3UK outperformed T-Mobile, with which it shares a 3G network.
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In this video, taken at TM Forum Management World, held in Ireland this week, Steve Shurrock, CEO of O2 Ireland talks about the ‘digitalisation’ of the health sector and the merging of the phone and the wallet as the operators makes its first moves in the financial services space.
The second and third-placed mobile operators in the Irish market, incumbent Eircom and Telefonica’s O2, have announced that they are to share networks in a deal that Eircom described as the first of its kind in Ireland. Eircom said that the deal will “result in an unrivalled mobile experience for customers” as the two carriers seek to meet growing demand for high bandwidth services.
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O2 has staked its claim to be the first UK operator to switch on a 3G network over 900MHz spectrum in London. Taking advantage of recent licensing changes, this latest rollout in London follows on the heels of similar deployments in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester; the London deployment is expected to deliver a 50 per cent increase in capacity and a 30 per cent increase in speed.
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Telefónica’s UK operation, O2, on Wednesday struck a deal with security and smart metering firm G4S to deploy a remote management and monitoring system for a national smart meter network.
The UK’s smallest operator, 3UK, is urging Ofcom to impose caps on spectrum allocation below 1GHz of bandwidth in order to prevent it from being squeezed out of the market.
Perhaps traffic offload is not the only motivation for O2 UK to roll out its own wifi network. On Thursday British broadcaster BSkyB confirmed its acquisition of the Cloud, giving the firm ownership of over 5,000 public wifi locations across the UK and one of O2’s wifi partners. While it does not operate a mobile network, Sky, in some respects is a competing service provider, especially when it comes to content.
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