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."

Comments

Re:Maybe it'll end up being costing the customer l

[Ash-Fox]

250MB per month is often considered generous.

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.

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.

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.