UK telecoms regulation, Ofcom, General Conditions, numbering, spectrum, switching, enforcement
Fujitsu’s announcement that it is planning to deploy a fibre to the home (FTTH) network to over 5 million UK rural homes is genuinely market changing. Until this announcement, received wisdom was that there were only two players in the UK’s next generation broadband infrastructure market – BT Openreach and Virgin Media. Both of these players have been…
The European Commission published on 6 April a Communication on policy objectives for the International Telecommunications Union World Radiocommunications Conference 2012 (WRC 12). WRC 12 is the next quadrennial meeting of governments and other stakeholders to coordinate international spectrum policy and to update the Radio Regulations. In marked contrast to many Commission documents, the Communication shows the Commission’s nervousness at Europe’s negotiating…
I hope all readers noticed the date for Friday’s blog post (taken down on 2 April) and are not planning on bidding in the teleportation spectrum auction. Avoiding the obvious pitfall of announcing anything serious on 1 April, Ofcom today published its Annual Plan for 2011/12. As a regular, if not avid, reader of such…
Ofcom today started a consultation on price controls for local loop unbundling and wholesale line rental products provided by Openreach, the functionally separate local access division of BT. This consultation follows on from Ofcom’s finding in its wholesale local access and wholesale fixed analogue exchange line market reviews that BT held a position in those markets…
News item topics are like buses – nothing happens for weeks or months, then everything happens at once. Following yesterday’s publication of the Phonepayplus annual plan and a market study, today Ofcom approved Phonepayplus’ 12th edition of its Code of Practice, which will become effective from 1 September 2011. For those not familiar with UK…
Phonepayplus, the UK’s premium rate services regulator, has today published: a Report on Emerging Trends in the Premium Rate Services Market; and its plan and budget for the forthcoming year. Report on Emerging Trends in the Premium Rate Services Market Phonepayplus commissioned the report from Analysys Mason and deals with services which are billed via a consumer’s telephone bill. The…
There has been some coverage recently of the case of Mr Spitz. Malte Spitz is a German green party politician and privacy advocate. He went to court to obtain details of the location information stored by his mobile phone provider and discovered that over a six month period that they had stored over 35,000 items…
Today post is a guest post from John Enser and Matt Phillips, and is the executive summary of Chapter 2 (‘Pipes’) of their 2011 Convergence Survey: The fundamental issue of how to deliver content and services is one that continues to dominate the industry, especially in the UK. The government needs to deliver on high-speed broadband…
Ofcom yesterday started a consultation on the rules for a proposed auction of 250 MHz of spectrum in the 800 MHz (aka ‘digital dividend’) band and 2.6 GHz band in the first half of 2012. This is equivalent to 75% of existing mobile spectrum. Whilst widely reported in the press as a ‘4G’ auction, apart from a proposed…
The biggest news this weekend was the announcement of the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion. The deal is conditional on regulatory approval, and I’ll be watching with interest as the other US mobile networks seek to gain advantage through the regulatory process. AT&T is the second largest US network and…
On 16 March the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (although as regular readers will know, no longer telecoms) published a consultation on options to reform the UK’s competition regime. The lengthy consultation’s aim is to introduce reforms to stimulate growth and it covers a variety of topics including: merging the Office of Fair Trading with…
Today saw the launch of the sixth Olswang Convergence Survey: ‘Does it add up’. I may now be able to see rather more of the authors, John Enser and Matt Phillips, as its preparation has consumed their every waking hour over the last few months. They carried out the first Convergence Survey back in 2005. Not…