Last week UK regulator Ofcom announced that mobile phone operators were now allowed to trade spectrum. Robin Kent, director of operations at Adax Europe, has published an open letter in response:
Following Ofcom’s announcement to allow phone operators to trade spectrum in a move intended to increase mobile network capacity, it seems that the whole industry is solely focused on this to resolve the strain on the network.
Trading spectrum is fine but it will still require investment and new equipment which must be funded from subscriber revenue. Today, customers are suffering inconsistent and poor service, simply because operators do not have the networks in place to be able to deal with a surge in demand.
In fact, there are steps mobile operators can already take to ensure they are not left behind without having to trade spectrum. If all out migration and the building of a complete new network is not really an option, then bringing together both new and legacy infrastructures in a heterogeneous network is the way to go.
Web surfing, downloads, IP video are all competing with what some might say is still the primary purpose of a mobile phone: voice calls! As a consequence of this demand operators need to get the non-urgent traffic off the core network as quickly as possible. By enabling high-bandwidth data applications to be offloaded at the cell site, while voice traffic continues to be carried over the existing TDM or ATM lines, we will start to ease the strain from the increased data demand.
| We spoke to Robin Kent about network capacity in our podcast on 12th January 2011. Click here to listen on our website - or subscribe to every podcast via RSS or on iTunes. |