SMF Study Identifies Weaknesses in UK 5G Mobile Deployments

A new report from the Social Market Foundation (SMF), which is a cross-party think-tank, has highlighted how the UK is still a long way from reaping the benefits of achieving ubiquitous 5G mobile (mobile broadband) connectivity. The report finds this is partly because previous policies toward mobile telecoms have “unintentionally hindered investment.” Solving that won’t be easy.

According to Ofcom’s data from January 2024 (here), some 85-92% of UK premises can now get outdoor 5G coverage by at least one operator, although this collapses to just 16-28% when looking at outdoor coverage by all operators combined. The regulator doesn’t yet offer a 5G figure for geographic coverage, but if they did, it would surely be a fair bit lower than the 85-92% mentioned earlier.

The new SMF report – ‘Growing Connections‘ (PDF) – similarly examines older (2023) crowdsourced data from Opensignal to show that 5G availability, when measured by the proportion of time users spent with an active 5G connection, sees the UK trailing many countries. For example, 5G users in the UK only have access to it around 10% of the time, which compares poorly with India (43%), South Korea (38%), France (20.6%) and Italy (17.9%) etc.

The report also highlights an analysis of international 5G download speeds, which was again sourced from Opensignal and suggests that the UK, which scored 113Mbps, is amongst the slowest. On the one hand, 113Mbps might not sound too bad, but many of the other big countries deliver between 133Mbps (Italy) and up to 437Mbps (South Korea).

Overall, the UK does seem to be lagging behind in its 5G performance and coverage, which is disappointing given that we were one of the first countries to start rolling the technology out. The SMF then highlights how another study had shown that, by 2035, “widespread availability and use of 5G could add £159 billion to the UK economy“. But such predictions should always be taken with a pinch of salt, since good 4G mobile services can already deliver many of the benefits that 5G is often associated with.

What went wrong

The report goes on to highlight how “a number of factors including previous policies towards the mobile telecoms sector have unintentionally hindered investment“. But surprisingly, there’s no specific mention of the previous UK Government’s decision to ban Huawei after the rollout had begun, which came as quite a significant blow to most mobile operators and set deployment plans back.

Instead, the report talks more generally about the Government and Ofcom’s “approach to spectrum,” which focuses on both the high costs involved in accessing / using mobile spectrum and the shortness of spectrum licences that are awarded (i.e. deterring “very long-term investment” and making it “less useful as an asset“). But we’d add that Ofcom being slow to release more spectrum bands for 5G hasn’t helped much either (e.g. other countries have had access to mmWave bands for years, but UK mobile operators are still waiting).

Curiously, the report does more specifically remark upon the impact from “some of the efforts to try cutting the cost of building infrastructure“(i.e. making it cheaper for MNOs to operate mobile masts), which it says “have resulted in less land being supplied for infrastructure and an unprecedented rise in the number of disputes between landowners and infrastructure builders along with a significant increase in costly litigation“.

At this point it’s worth highlighting that the new report was “kindly supported by APWireless,” which is a company with its own vested interests. Some operators view them as being a land aggregator, which adopts a lease premium model that sometimes seems to involve buying out expiring leases from landowners and charging mobile operators a lot more for them in the process.

Naturally, a company like APW may thus have issues with the new government’s potential plans for reforming the Electronic Communications Code (here), which governs land / property access – particularly if those changes end up threatening their business model.

The report then goes on to highlight other obstacles, such as the well-documented delays in the planning system and related objections to new masts, which are complex areas to resolve as politicians don’t want to upset the electorate. But at the same time, they also have to balance that against the need to support the roll-out of better mobile and broadband networks, particularly in some of the hardest to reach areas, where commercial models often struggle.

Finally, the report notes how there have been calls for consolidation (i.e. allowing the Vodafone and Three UK merger) to address the “comparatively low levels of profitability” of the country’s four mobile network operators, which is seen as limiting the investment that is needed. But the evidence around the impacts of consolidation remains mixed, with the competition watchdog (CMA) noting that it may reduce competition and result in higher prices for consumers (negotiations are taking place to try and address that).

Sadly, the report doesn’t seem to include a list of clear recommendations and is more attempting to summarise – at a high level – the current state of play and where it perceives the problems to exist, albeit at least in part coming from the perspective of a company that harbours a particular vested interest in this area. Take with a pinch of salt.