Mobile Operator Three UK Appoint New CIO and Director of RAN
Mobile operator Three UK has today announced that they’ve appointed Belinda Finch to be their new Chief Information Officer (CIO), responsible for its Digital and ICT strategy. At the same time they’ve also named Peter Gilson as their Director of Radio Access Networks (RAN).
Belinda has plenty of experience in the telecommunications and utilities infrastructure sectors, having previously held a Group CIO and Chief of Staff role at Centrica, and 8 years in digital transformation roles at Vodafone. Meanwhile Peter most recently worked at O2, managing the relationship with Vodafone and Cornerstone as part of their UK network sharing agreement.
Belinda will lead a team of 130 by bringing together all existing IT functions at Three UK under one management team. In this new role, she will also be responsible for delivering the final stages of the operator’s IT transformation programme, which they hope will result in system improvements and a better customer experience.
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As for Peter, he’ll be responsible for the design, build and performance of Three UK’s network, using a 100MHz block of contiguous spectrum to deliver the “UK’s fastest 5G network” (this is yet to be proven) and enhance its 4G network.
Susan Buttsworth, Chief Operating Officer at Three UK, said:
“Having a robust and leading IT strategy and senior-level focus on our network is integral to our success. It underpins everything we do, from getting the best from our technology, to offering best in class systems to serve our customers.
We’re really excited to have Belinda and Peter joining Three UK leading these key pieces of work.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Good luck to them, they will need it with the massive decline in data speed over the years. Was with them for 9 years and had to leave due to awful data speeds and looking online it seems to be a country wide problem.
Fresh talent is always good.
I’ve seen speeds improve around places in Cardiff & in recent months just outside the city in my village more speed with VoLTE [on band 3]
Had Three for 3G a while back. They were the best.
Went from EE to Virgin Mobile based on price and tariff offering. VM was good, consistently 60-70mbs most of the places I went to in South East and East.
Left because VM were saying at the time going to Vodafone at a future date (now O2) and went to Three because 5G included and 8GB for £8 and unlimited calls.
Had nearly a year, and can’t wait to leave using 4G. Only ONE town gives 40mbs – the rest of the time its 1mbps to 8mbps on average. Pages timeout waiting to resolve etc.
Back to VM for next year ahead as retentions bundled a 5GB oomph SIM for free on my deal. Put into phone as 2nd SIM for now and speeds are back despite lower signal at my home location than Three.
Any deals on hotukdeals for Three and you get pages of people saying similar about the speeds – only some areas seem to be OK.
Well, Three certainly need a new injection of leadership, I’ve seen none whatsoever in the 12 months I’ve been with them for their 4g home broadband offering. All I’ve seen is a 5g marketing push with promises they have no intention of keeping. Throughout the entire of 2020 4g speeds have continued to drop month after month for me. Service reliability is poor at the best of times and communication with its customers is non-existent.
Three need to take their ostrich like head out of the sand, start listening to its customers and improve the quality and reliability of the services their customers pay for.
Let’s hope the new blood will mark a sea change within the company and it actually starts to “walk the walk”, rather than just more of the same “talking the talk.”