UK: Mobile OpCos to keep 3G licenses, strings attached
By Ben Robinson on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 10:11 AM PST In Financial/Corporate News, UK News
An interesting story from Fierce Wireless – they are reporting that the UK Communications Minister may not force the UK operators to renew their 3G licenses, IF they agree to support the Goverment universal broadband plans.
For those of you wondering that the universal broadband plans are, it is a mandate that everyone in the UK should be able to receive at least 2Mbps… 2Mbps I hear you say? Ain’t that mighty slow! Well, yes is it in my opinion, and I still don’t see how that number was arrived at – particularly since most Mobile Broadband dongles can run nearly twice as fast as that!
Anyway, back to the story. Whilst supporting the universal broadband plans might seem within the scope of Operator mobile broadband rollout anyway, it WILL be expensive for them – because of having to rollout infrastructure to fill in the patches where bandwidth is either low or non-existent… and the $64,000 question (as they say), is: will that be cheaper that what a renewed license would cost? Probably…Maybe….Perhaps…..
[Via: Fierce Wireless]
2M is only slow to those in Urban areas. Lots and Lots of people would love to get 2M in rural areas all over the world. I pay over a $100 a month for 3M in Alaska, and that’s the top consumer tier for DSL (Lots of villages and small towns I work in pay $50 for 128k).
The FCC JUST raised the minimum speed considered to be “Broadband” to 768k.
Don’t be a bandwidth snob Ben.
Well, in the UK, mobile broadband is now down to as little as GBP£5 or £7.50 (sometimes with a voice call package, but not always), or £2/day, £10/week, £20/month for pay as you go (where obviously you only pay on the days you use it) so it’s pretty competitive across the 5 networks now offering it here, even if you don’t think it’s fast. However, watch what you think you’re getting on mobile broadband (which in the UK always means 3G not wi-fi) – often Windows will show the maximum speed your device/network is capable of, but it isn’t running at that. The UK is at c.90% 3G population coverage and very wide geographical coverage (which isn’t the case in North America). The two are similar due to the density of population, esp. in the UK. So yes, services here offer up to 7.2meg *theoretical* max (soon to be 14.4 and above), but real experience max of 4.5 (7.2 is merely a technical standard, in effect). I’d rather have reliable and widespread 1-2meg, than a few isolated spots of speeds above that. For maximum speeds, fixed line always wins and the technology difference will stay that way, even with LTE.