Communications regulator Ofcom has told the UK government that it should make 2G (mobile phone voice communications) radio spectrum available for 3G (UMTS) / Mobile Broadband services as soon as possible. The conclusion came as part of a new paper concerning its analysis of the consumer and competition issues that might arise from opening up existing 900MHz and 1800MHz radio spectrum for use by 3G services.

The regulator found that liberalising 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum in the hands of the existing licensees (i.e. O2 and Vodafone UK), without imposing conditions (beyond essential technical requirements), was likely to benefit consumers and is unlikely to result in a material distortion of competition, which would have required further action to be taken. In particular it would make reaching rural areas with Mobile Broadband services much more viable.

The 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum liberalisation benefits:

* Greater network capacity allowing more customers to be served and to enjoy higher mobile broadband speeds (both 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum);

* Improved quality of coverage allowing customers to use mobile broadband in more locations with greater consistency (900MHz spectrum);

* Improved in-building coverage (900MHz spectrum).

* Wider coverage of rural areas (900MHz spectrum).

The sweet spot is 900MHz, which is already well deployed and could provide many consumers with an instant benefit. By contrast Ofcom described 1800MHz as being less well developed in terms of both likely speed of availability of equipment and services. The only barrier to effective use of both bands for Mobile Broadband is regulation.

However, at present the only owners of 900MHz are O2 and Vodafone UK and neither have been terribly keen on sharing access to the band with their three rivals ( Three (3) , Orange and T-Mobile ). Some good news for them could be that Ofcom no longer considers this a problem.


The result could be good news for rural areas and the government, which will have less time consuming negotiation to do and won't need to press either O2 or Vodafone to share out their 900MHz spectrum. However it's also possible that T-Mobile , Vodafone and Three (3) might have a problem with this outcome, though it would be difficult for them to fight.

The government itself had planned to get this all resolved by the end of 2011, although Ofcom has now cleared the path for a prompt resolution.