Slashdot Mirror
British Regulator Investigated Over Low 4G Auction Revenue
judgecorp writes "Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, raised £2.3 billion in the 4G spectrum auction when the government had hoped for £3.5 billion. Now Ofcom's auction is being investigated by the National Audit Office over whether it provided value for money for the British taxpayer. Ironically, the auction resulted in a low price but spread the bandwidth amongst rival firms, and so provided better value than if the auction had created a partial monopoly or (as happened in the 3G auctions in 2000) gouged as much money as possible from the operators leaving them unable to actually build a network."
When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow, despite the fact that billions had been spent on acquiring the licence for the spectrum, let alone from the infrastructure costs. Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.
And so now we come to 4G. I happen to be on a network that was an early adopter of 4G and they've been pushing it agressively since they got the licence. Yet, it's only available in 10 cities (not mine), costs a minimum of £50 per month and the monthly bandwidth allowance can be used up in a matter of minutes if you actually use it.
Hopefully this time, with lots of companies getting in on the action rather than just a couple, there'll be competition and it'll actually become a viable technology for the customer rather than just being good in theory.
The investigation being pressed is to see if the bidders colluded before and during the auction to keep the price down. This is illegal under British law but that's not stopped folks before.
I have no idea what UK you live in, I'm with Three and have been for numerous years. I pay 25GBP (comparable to broadband costs and that's not even adding line rental costs etc from landline to it!) a month for unlimited Internet with tethering (along with a bunch of other things like 3000 minutes, texts etc). If your memory fails you, Three was that network that has only 3g towers (they rent 2g from other providers). They were the ones that provided free, unlimited options to all users on their network, including Skype, Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger etc.
Maybe you should switch to Three? They stated they have no intention of charging extra for 4G either. In other words, the existing cheap plan coverage, covers 4G as well.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.