Posted: 24th Jun, 2003 By: MarkJ
Critics of last weeks 3.4GHz broadband wireless licenses auction, which ended on 17th June and raised roughly £7m, have warned that the UK governments confidence in its "success" may be misplaced:
Critics of the auction, which closed last week, believe serious mistakes were made in the way the licences were designed, meaning that the winning bidders are under no obligation to use them to provide broadband services to homes and businesses.
Intellect, a trade body that represents Britain's IT, telecoms and electronics industry, fears that the auction will fail to give a boost to Broadband Britain, at a time when the crisis over broadband availability in rural areas is reaching a crescendo. "There's a growing feeling that the spectrum will be used to provide services other than wireless broadband," Graham MacDonald, senior radio executive at Intellect, told ZDNet UK News on Monday.Unfortunately it may well be too late for such arguments to be noticed; indeed several similar pre-auction statements were also largely ignored by the government.
Still, the government does insist that the benefits will soon arise and no doubt we, along with many others, will be watching for them. More @
ZDNet.