This article is more than 1 year old

UK national mobile roaming: A stupid idea that'll never work

Plus: Not spot rural mobile coverage sites each require NINETEEN signatures

Psssst... faster decommissioning

For an Italian to be criticising UK governmental practices, things must be bad.

Colao’s second point is less contentious. “There is a need to add electronic equipment to ours and our competitors' equipment on existing masts. There's no point in building masts when you can use your competitors or existing ones. There's also too many restrictions here that landlords can apply, so the solution would be to declare us [the mobile telecoms industry] a critical infrastructure, allowing us to put up whatever."

Colao wants this done quickly, as it's the type of thing that's "very easy and the Government can do it in a heartbeat”.

He saves the hardest point until last. “The third wish is more controversial in this country - higher masts. Now, I understand this is very sensitive but I am not sure why London should have 17m average height and Madrid or Milan 24m. I mean it doesn’t seem to me that they are particularly less appealing from a landscape point of view."

Unintended consequences. Mast decommissioning could accelerate if national roaming is introduced

What you can be sure of, however, is that one of the things the networks won’t explain to Javid is one of the other effects of easing restrictions on planning and site sharing: they will be able to decommission sites faster.

There is significant economic benefit in shutting down sites - particularly in hard to access places - and while all the networks will constantly trumpet the number of new sites, they never report how many they have decommissioned. One industry expert believes that the networks have rushed to close sites down in anticipation of having new equipment for site sharing deals and then found the way blocked.

Perhaps there needs to be permission granted for a network to leave a site, and that needs to be predicated upon new sites being built. And whatever they decide, we’ll need a better way of measuring the results than the current hotch-potch of different metrics from each of the operators, Ofcom and independent research. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like