News - 4G auction winners are announced by Ofcom

[HEXUS]

EE, Three, Niche Spectrum Ventures, O2 and Vodafone have all won spectrum.

Read more.

[kingpotnoodle]

£2.3 billion, not bad revenue for a piece of paper (probably really a vague PDF) allowing you to send something invisible through thin air... wonder how much profit there was in that that'll end up in the treasury and how much Ofcom splurged on the bidding process and associated "business functions".

No surprises in the winners really. Roll on better data coverage, I couldn't give a stuff about the raw speed, I'd prefer to get 5-10Mb uninterrupted everywhere (including the countryside, where the trains spend most of their time and there are few signs so sat-nav matters) than 100Mb in the towns.

Edit: that woman in the picture is a bad advert for 4G - that just says 4G ruins your hair and makes you look like a cheap sci-fi monster.

[watercooled]

Those bids are far lower than the 2100MHz bids: http://www.solwise.co.uk/3g-intro.htm
In fact, all these bids combined don't even come close to one of the 2100MHz bids.

And the government have already announced how they intend to spend the money gained. The bids ensure operators don't sit around forever rolling out new services - they've just invested a lot of money so they need to get a move on before the competition takes away a lot of their business/money which would be very hard to regain.

[Kushan]

£2.3 billion, not bad revenue for a piece of paper (probably really a vague PDF) allowing you to send something invisible through thin air... wonder how much profit there was in that that'll end up in the treasury and how much Ofcom splurged on the bidding process and associated "business functions".

No surprises in the winners really. Roll on better data coverage, I couldn't give a stuff about the raw speed, I'd prefer to get 5-10Mb uninterrupted everywhere (including the countryside, where the trains spend most of their time and there are few signs so sat-nav matters) than 100Mb in the towns.

Edit: that woman in the picture is a bad advert for 4G - that just says 4G ruins your hair and makes you look like a cheap sci-fi monster.

You say as if they're selling "nothing" for free, but the reality is that there's a million different uses for the spectrum and if it was just a free for all, nothing would work. It seems pricey, but really it's the price you pay to ensure that you get a chunk of a very finite resource without anyone else using it.

[ajones]

The results are quite surprising to me.

That's a lot of spectrum for EE (they now have 105MHz in total), and it looks like O2 got mugged.

It will be interesting to see what NSV do with that spectrum, since the business plan from BT is unclear. Not enough for them to deploy mobile Broadband and worry the incumbent operators. Maybe they'll share with O2...?

Vodafone have done well, but then they have forked over the lions share.

[Spud1]

Wow that is surprisingly cheap - well under expectations and although it was obviously going to be well under the pricing paid for 3G (since current LTE systems are exclusively for data transfer - all current LTE phones in the UK drop back to 3G for voice)...its still peanuts really.

Lets see how this changes the market - I predict that initially we'll have the same situation as with EE, so a huge premium and tiny tiny data limits, but in a couple of years time who knows.

Biggest question is what will BT do with theirs...

[Brewster0101]

and it looks like O2 got mugged.

I believe O2 will be sharing with Vodaphone their 4G network

[kingpotnoodle]

You say as if they're selling "nothing" for free, but the reality is that there's a million different uses for the spectrum and if it was just a free for all, nothing would work. It seems pricey, but really it's the price you pay to ensure that you get a chunk of a very finite resource without anyone else using it.

They aren't selling anything, that's the point, no product or substance changes hands. The government has just made a net profit from just auctioning the right to do something, it's a cunning revenue stream (whichever politician dreamed up spectrum auctions was a shrewd one)... they could simply have asked companies to submit an application and then picked the best but that would have cost the government money and probably ended up with appeals, legal challenges and all kinds of crap. Auction strategy is full of win as far as the government are concerned.

Only problem is it largely prevents new entrants without hugely deep pockets and really it's an indirect tax on us, it's not like the buyers of the licences don't pass on these costs to their customers. But like watercooled says money talks and something has to push them to use what they've acquired rather than just sit on it to spite other companies, and by making it a monetary incentive rather than regulatory/legal it means Ofcom can now be hands off and not have to hound them, the companies will hound themselves to re-coup the cash.

[ajones]

I believe O2 will be sharing with Vodaphone their 4G network

You are correct to a point. However, EU legislation prevents operators from Spectrum sharing unless they setup a joint venture company to handle it. so put yourself in Voda's shoes; Would you want to do that when you're sitting there with 30MHz of FDD and 25MHz of TDD spectrum, and your RAN sharing partner only has 10MHz FDD to join the party...

[Spud1]

You are correct to a point. However, EU legislation prevents operators from Spectrum sharing unless they setup a joint venture company to handle it. so put yourself in Voda's shoes; Would you want to do that when you're sitting there with 30MHz of FDD and 25MHz of TDD spectrum, and your RAN sharing partner only has 10MHz FDD to join the party...

I think that they are only sharing infrastructure not services - so they may use the same masts/equpiment but the networks themselves will be separate..full details should be available soon as I think that kicks in around April.

[phili_c51]

The government forecast £3.5bn so there's another shortfall the tax payers will have to foot. Also considerably lower than the bidding of 3g which back in the day I believe to have been over £20bn in total

[ajones]

I think that they are only sharing infrastructure not services - so they may use the same masts/equpiment but the networks themselves will be separate..full details should be available soon as I think that kicks in around April.

Exactly, so I'll stick to my original point that O2 have been mugged! Regardless of the saving they may achieve sharing site infrastructure with Vodafone, they only have 10MHz more spectrum to play with, which isn't very much for LTE.

[watercooled]

You are correct to a point. However, EU legislation prevents operators from Spectrum sharing unless they setup a joint venture company to handle it. so put yourself in Voda's shoes; Would you want to do that when you're sitting there with 30MHz of FDD and 25MHz of TDD spectrum, and your RAN sharing partner only has 10MHz FDD to join the party...

At least, AFAIK, the TDD spectrum will be used with LTE (it's part of the spec anyway). I don't think anyone's using the unpaired 2100MHz spectrum in the UK even now?

But yeah Telefonica do seem to have ended up with a poor deal! Hutchinson didn't end up with much either, but at least they're getting some 1800MHz from EE. And EE seem to have ended up with an awful lot of 2.6GHz for their money!

[ajones]

At least, AFAIK, the TDD spectrum will be used with LTE (it's part of the spec anyway). I don't think anyone's using the unpaired 2100MHz spectrum in the UK even now?

But yeah Telefonica do seem to have ended up with a poor deal! Hutchinson didn't end up with much either, but at least they're getting some 1800MHz from EE. And EE seem to have ended up with an awful lot of 2.6GHz for their money!

TDD was part of the UMTS spec, but never really took off. None of the existing GSM or UMTS networks in the UK (and most of Europe) are using TDD, and that's unlikely to change given that you could almost consider those techs as legacy. It'll be interesting to see what Voda and NSV to with their TDD allocations. UK Broadband have been doing ok with their 3.5GHz TDD spectrum.

I think we'll be seeing some interesting spectrum refarming moves by O2 unless they can gain access to more spectrum from somewhere.

[kingpotnoodle]

The government forecast £3.5bn so there's another shortfall the tax payers will have to foot. Also considerably lower than the bidding of 3g which back in the day I believe to have been over £20bn in total

So we can pay the mobile operators so they can pay the government a licence fee, or we can pay the government direct as taxes... what's the difference?

[watercooled]

TDD was part of the UMTS spec, but never really took off. None of the existing GSM or UMTS networks in the UK (and most of Europe) are using TDD, and that's unlikely to change given that you could almost consider those techs as legacy. It'll be interesting to see what Voda and NSV to with their TDD allocations. UK Broadband have been doing ok with their 3.5GHz TDD spectrum.

I think we'll be seeing some interesting spectrum refarming moves by O2 unless they can gain access to more spectrum from somewhere.

Didn't it need different equipment though? With LTE, one set should be capable of both if I understand it correctly?