By: MarkJ - 8 April, 2009 (9:03 AM) - Score: 5925 - Mobile Broadband

Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012 (original news). Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, HSPA etc.) services being used to fill the gap, but is that realistic?

Mobile Broadband is certainly a wonderfully simple, accessible and deceptively cheap (provided you don't go over your usage allowance) technology (see our 'How to Use Mobile Broadband' article), but it is not without fault. The technology suffers from a number of pitfalls that make us question its role in any USO.

The Problems

1. Connection Stability

We've tried several Mobile Broadband services around the UK, including different USB Modems, and sometimes even in areas of strong coverage connections can drop or suddenly become wildly unstable. No broadband service is perfect but this is one of the more unreliable aspects of the tech.

2. High or Variable Latency

Several online applications, including multiplayer gaming, are reliant upon a stable level of lower latency (time it takes for a server to respond when you relay data through it). In this field Mobile Broadband is improving, but for now its variability makes it less than ideal for most low latency applications.

3. Forced Image/Picture Compression

Most, if not all, of the UK's Mobile Broadband operators force an extremely high level of image compression upon you. This saves bandwidth and helps speed, which is fine so long as viewing pictures is not important to you. Unfortunately for everybody else it results in ugly distortions and makes surfing a less than pleasant experience.

4. Essential Applications Blocked

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Mobile Broadband is the way that many operators deliberately restrict your access to essential online applications, such as VoIP (Skype etc.) and some Instant Messaging platforms (MSN) among others.

5. Speeds

Some operators promote speeds of up to 7.2Mbps or higher, though in reality you're more likely to experience performance closer to 1Mbps. This could be improved by 2012 but we still have doubts about network capacity and its ability to deliver on a 2Mbps USO promise.

Presently speeds of up to 2Mbps should be available to around 93% of the UK, though Ofcom's chief, Ed Richards, recently said that 15% of the country couldn't access 2Mbps. So what we can and cannot deliver seems to depend entirely upon who you're speaking with at the time.

Now we're not saying that Mobile Broadband is bad, it's not.. in fact it's an excellent service for casual or roaming (UK) Internet usage, but should it be made a part of the USO with its current faults and restrictions? The risk here is that you'd end up supplying a highly restrictive Internet service to people without a choice.

Mercifully mobile operators are equally cautions, with many dissuading themselves from promoting Mobile Broadband as a replacement for Land-Line services. T-Mobile also recently warned about the economic and technical difficulties of making it fit a 2Mbps USO. Lord Carter has even admitted that Mobile Broadband can't be the only solution.

Still, 2012 is a few years off and by then we should be seeing the first next generation (Long Term Evolution) 4G Mobile Broadband technologies coming into play, which will be a lot faster. Lord Carter said the following while on at a visit to Motorola's UK LTE testing lab in Swindon this week:


These newer services will improve performance even further but it remains to be seen whether operators will also stop preventing access to certain applications and give consumers more choice. On top of all this operators have a capacity problem to worry about, Mobile Broadband is not as cheap as it looks to run and a USO could put pressure on their delicate balance.