Wireless technology central to government vision; spectrum shake-up on the way.
The UK government has laid out its plans to revamp the the country's internet and communications infrastructure, in a bid to make Britain the 'digital capital of the world.'
The new proposals were detailed this afternoon in a report from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport called 'Digital Britain,' penned by communication minister Lord Carter.
And it has significant implications for the UK's mobile industry.
The grand strategy behind the document is to get every single person in Britain using the internet, a proposal which the government claims makes moral as well as economic sense, citing a perceived link between what it calls 'digital exclusion' and genuine social exclusion.
To support the government's aims, Martha Lane Fox has been appointed as 'champion for digital inclusion', heading up a task force of ten expert advisors.
In terms of specific wireless action points the report has today set out its three objectives:
- A rapid transition to next generation high-speed mobile broadband.
- Progress towards universal coverage in 3G and what the report calls Next Generation Mobile. This includes coverage on London's Underground.
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- The maintenance of a highly competitive mobile market.
Furthermore, the government has formally accepted the essentials of a report filed by its Independent Spectrum Broker back in May. These included:
- Timely clearance of the 800MHz spectrum band being released by television’s Digital Switchover.
- Combination of the 800MHz spectrum with most of the so-called 3G expansion band in a single auction of 10MHz-width blocks of spectrum.
- The timely liberalisation of existing 2G mobile spectrum in the hands of the existing operators, coupled with caps on the amounts of spectrum that existing operators can acquire and coverage requirements on the 800MHz licences, since that spectrum is particularly well suited to rural coverage.
The UK government has also laid out a process of Guiding Technical Arbitration on the 2G liberalisation.
It says the aim of these proposals is to ensure that each of the five existing mobile operators and potential new entrants can bid with a realistic opportunity of acquiring sufficient spectrum to build out a next generation mobile network capable of 50Mbps broadband speeds in the main urban and suburban markets, going down to 4-5Mbps in the more rural areas.
The aim is to make this happen with what the report calls the same degree of 'intense competition' within which the market currently operates.
To read the full Digital Britain report, head to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's website.
