British Regulator Investigated Over Low 4G Auction Revenue 116
judgecorp writes "Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, raised £2.3 billion in the 4G spectrum auction when the government had hoped for £3.5 billion. Now Ofcom's auction is being investigated by the National Audit Office over whether it provided value for money for the British taxpayer. Ironically, the auction resulted in a low price but spread the bandwidth amongst rival firms, and so provided better value than if the auction had created a partial monopoly or (as happened in the 3G auctions in 2000) gouged as much money as possible from the operators leaving them unable to actually build a network."
Re:Policy (Score:5, Interesting)
The Tory party sold off publicly owned infrastructure for a fraction of what it is really worth. Is anyone surprised?
Well at least this time Ofcom created an environment condusive to competition by not gouging out as much money as possible. The irony is that the Tories are now investigating Ofcom for not extorting as much money as possible and thus creating a reasonably level playing field for competition. This is very funny because Thatcherist/Tories tend to never shut up about how competition is good for the citizenry since it lowers costs. That being said I'm generally against selling off publically owned infrastructure since I have rarely seen it work out well and it tends to end with some form of cartel that effectively has a license to tax the public. In this case selling the spectrum was the thing to do, unless you want the govt. to' do what? Rent it out?
Re:Policy (Score:3, Interesting)
I was with you until the "rather than do something that will reduce the deficit perpetually" bit.
Exactly what makes you think that an economy in the grip of a 4 year recession about to hit it's third dip, recovering less well than it did in the 1930s is the right time to continue with GDP shrinking austerity? Has the Conservative "message" been so effectively fed that people aren't even questioning the sanity of the policy? As a lifetime Liberal voter I am utterly disgusted by the parties kow-towing to discredited neo-thatcherism - this is the party of John Maynard Keynes and the party that first pushed for a National Health Service. They of all people should be refusing to stand by and let another generation go to waste.
Pro-tip - you reduce the deficit when the economy is healthy, that way the "austerity" acts as a brake preventing overheating and the growth in the GDP multiplies the effect of the deficit reduction. It's not hard people...
Re: Policy (Score:4, Interesting)
The public have never owned any mobile network infrastructure.
The government are selling licences to use a particular part of the spectrum.
If you want to go back to the bad old days of waiting weeks for a phone then feel free to do so, but elsewhere, not in the UK. Telecoms is without doubt one of the most successful privatisations. BT was challenged by competition and had to up its game in all areas. We, the consumers, won and moribund management lost out.
Do you pine for the days of union closed shops and secondary action too?
Re:Maybe it'll end up being costing the customer l (Score:5, Interesting)
When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow,
So, the same as 4G then...
At the moment 4G is completely pointless:
- Its only availble in highly populated built up areas (i.e. where there are already plenty of wifi hotspots)
- Its pretty expensive (although EE have at least made their pricing slightly saner since their initial launch, which saw them bundling lots of free talktime and SMS but charging through the nose for data - what exactly do they think people will upgrade to 4G for?)
- There's still not a lot of hardware that supports 4G
3G had very similar problems (ok, so it wasn't competing with wifi, but it was expensive, not widely supported by hardware and had terrible coverage). 4G will improve, just as 3G did, but for now I don't see the value in paying more for 4G network access.
Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.
Really? You can get some pretty cheap contracts offering gigabytes per month. Personally, I'm on a PAYG plan - I get 150MB "free" (expires after 45 days) every time I add £5 to my account balance, and I can purchase a 2GB bundle (expires after 30 days) for £5, which is taken from that account balance. As it happens, I often don't need more than 150MB over 45 days, so assuming I didn't use the phone for anything else that would be £5 for 75 days worth of data (so £2/month), but worst case its £5/month for over 2GB of data/month, which seems a pretty reasonable deal to me.
If you want to use 3G as a home internet connection then you probably want more than 2GB, but there are still pretty good options here - a quick look at Three's pricing shows they do a 10GB for £15.