UK Govt's Expensive Mobile Coverage Project Builds Just 8 Masts In 4 Years 75
An anonymous reader points out a dismal report at The Register on a project intended by the UK government to connect lots of internet have-nots, but which has so far not accomplished as much as hoped. The Mobile Infrastructure Project is intended to provide last-mile connectivity, but the project has languished, and fallen short of its promises. This year, Department for Culture, Media and Sport has managed to erect only six masts, which can serve about 200 homes apiece.
Originally more than 575 sites had been commissioned, following the publication of the “no coverage” database by watchdog Ofcom. At the rate seen so far of four masts a year it will take over 140 years to complete the £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project. The original deadline was to to have all the sites equipped and live by the end of 2015. However, that deadline was extended to March 2016 to "ensure that benefits of the program are maximized."
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Could this be a problem endemic to organizations that spend money that they didn't really do anything to earn in the first place?
No. If that were true, all people who are born rich, and all rich families would be completely useless to society. Many of them are. Some of them are not. You need a different theory.
Re: A problem with spending unearned money? (Score:3)
Orgs that don't have to worry where next year's operating income will come from will never be as motivated to hit timelines as orgs that have to build and sell things in order to continue to exist. Nonprofits with endowments or steady donation commitments, government funded science or other orgs, and government agencies all fall into this category.
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The problem is that the people paying for the masts and providing the sites don't benefit from them, so they have no incentive to go along with the project.
So this is another case of a poorly written contract and insufficient oversight. No, I'm not going to blame the government, I see this as much (or more) with large corporations. The contract is to build towers. There isn't a cancellation clause for failure to perform (or it's not being exercised). Or a claw-back for delays.
One of the things government does right is roads in Dallas. The new LBJ toll express lanes were done months ahead of schedule. I didn't live there for that, but I did when US-75 was
Despite all evidence (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite evidence like this which speaks volumes about government intervention in what is a free-market area of expertise, we still have so many people clamoring for the government to offer all kinds of services like healthcare, telephone, internet, etc.
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Of course companies fail. That is the entire point to a free market and why it works. The free market optimizes the problem of who gets to control resources. If a company fails to generate profits that means it is using more resources than the customers give it. It then goes out of business and the resources are freed up to more profitable companies to make use of.
Government is the exact opposite. If a department does its job well and actually reduces a problem its budget stagnates. If it does a very poor j
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Only if you consider the Central Banks abort to flood the market with cheap money inflating bubbles a part of the free market.
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Didn't sound like a personal attack. The solution is to allow a free market in money, gold, silver, bitcoin, tulip bulbs, Amex gift cards, etc. When you give anyone the power to create money out of nothing expect it to be abused and the powerful to fight for that control.
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Meh, it's just a question of management and accountability, this project clearly had very little of either. Projects farmed out to the private sector with stiff penalties for delays and failures (with insurance to cover the costs in case of bankruptcies) can quite often be an adequate way to get the most out of public funds. And/or ditch the jobs for life mentality that many government workers seem to have.
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As for the jobs for life mentality, too many people who think their job is on the line are afraid to buck the system, stand up for what's right, and talk about problems.
Funny how it seems that it cuts both ways, isn't it?
Even funnier is the way it works out the exact opposite to what you seem to imagine. The jobs for life brigade are the most likely to keep their heads down because they're both aiming for a career and scared of being shunted off into a dead end paper shuffling position if they step on the wrong toes - you have to live with that job for life. Office politics in government bureaucracies are far more vicious than in the private sector.
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Often times the most effective public works projects are managed with a combination of for profit private enterprise and sober government oversight.
The original deadline was to to have all the sites equipped and live by the end of 2015. However, that deadline was extended to March 2016 to "ensure that benefits of the programme are maximised.
Except for the colloquial spelling distinctions, almost exactly the same as most USian government projects.
If the exaggerated completion scope can be remediated by some massive cost overruns, then it is precisely the same.
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It's easy to say government doesn't work when your side is busy doing everything in its power to ensure that outcome.
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As maybe the only Slashdot user who has actually taken a class from Milton Friedman, I feel obliged to say that I don't think he was an evil man, just a True Believer. The policies that have come from his writing have been disastrous, even evil, but he was just a zealot.
[I was a 17 yr old UofC undergrad and it was a lecture course with over 100 people in it, so I didn't really know him. He taught some interesti
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There is a cost/benefit analysis you need to do before you live anywhere. A city has lots of access to goods and services but is expensive. The middle of nowhere is beautiful and peaceful but you miss the benefits of society. But if you vote for the right politician you can have both by forcing other people to subsidize your costs of living in the middle of nowhere.
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... but but but ... internet access is a human right! It better be pretty fast too.
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There us a cost/benefit analysis to not subsidising more rural areas. If you encourage everyone to move to densely populated areas it creates various problems, which ultimately you will end up paying for.
Re:Despite all evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pretty major distinction: walking in on something that the private sector is doing vigorously and competently and deciding that we need a Ministry of Whatever is folly. Coming into a situation that the private sector is unable or unwilling to address and doing something about it is what 'the public sector' is all about.
There is room for debate about what counts as 'unable or unwilling', and when we should do something vs. just let them suck it up; but 'do what the private sector won't or can't' is essentially the mission statement of even libertarian governments(they just interpret that as a pretty small number of things).
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AC most of the cash would have gone into mapping and working out what was a "no coverage" area and would stay as "no coverage" long term.
Was a remote area in need of coverage, having no other traditional services and lacking in the ability to attract traditional private shared telco interest.
Height, location, costs, floods, numbers of users, power options, existing telco connections in the area that could be used or extended, what providers in the
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The question, though, is whether the project was always folly(either in that its objectives weren't worth the price even if the
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It hasn't massively failed, unless massive failure means simply not proceeded as quickly as they could have.
Do try to remember that is an important distinction.
Maybe the question was if they had the authority to complete the task in the time expected. However, since they've only spent part of their budget, and they have begun to proceed, it's at least possible this is more of a delay than a massive failure.
A massive failure would be something like these towers not even working.
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The free market failed to deliver essential services. The government encouraged the free market to serve those areas, but the free market still failed. The logical conclusion is that the government should just provide the services directly itself.
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So can I build a house in the middle of the Antarctic and get others to pay for my power and cell phone?
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So can I build a house in the middle of the Antarctic and get others to pay for my power and cell phone?
It's beneficial to governments to have taxpayers dotting the country, so they are willing to spend some money to accommodate people who live in the sticks.
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If they are rich they can afford their own fire protection.
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Remind me who the government of the Antarctic is again. What did their last manifesto say about cell coverage?
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http://www.coolantarctica.com/... [coolantarctica.com]
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Before you talk about public vs private inefficiencies I suggest you look up some private sector project fuckups as well. Just an anecdote but I witnessed a $50m project to upgrade a process plant to reduce acid consumption. It was originally a $10m project. That got changed half way through, then got changed half way through the new scope, and then got changed again a 3rd time. I'm sure they would have made changes again but they canned the project after spending $40m and have absolutely zero to show for i
Yes, Minister (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, Minister [imdb.com] and Yes, Primer Minister [imdb.com].
All politics is local (Score:2)
It added there had been problems with site providers' willingness to allow a mast to be erected, local planning application, the availability of power and access and meeting the final value for money test based on build costs rather than forecast costs.
In other words, they fudged the numbers to make it look cost effective and ignored that fact that they can't just walk in and force people to give up their private property..
Trouble erecting masts? (Score:2)
Correct your story, then come back with it. (Score:2)
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I work for a private school that's near a huge town inside the M25. It sits in the middle of borough-owned land and the land was sold to the borough with a permanent legal edict that it can only be used for a school. Thus, even the government can never build anything else on it but a school. There are no neighbours to speak of (the school owns most of the surrounding buildings for staff), and nobody can even SEE the school from the local towns/roads anyway as its so set back. There are huge full-size py
TL;DR version (Score:5, Interesting)
UK network operators are castigated by the UK Government for not building out mobile coverage in rural areas.
Network Operators respond by pointing out that they don't because of the difficulty in finding locations to provide the required coverage, local planning applications, the availability of power and problems with site access.
UK Government says "amateurs, we can do it better than you" so sets up project to do just that.
Project spectacularly fails to achieve anything and sheepishly admits that the reasons for its failure are due to the difficulty in finding locations to provide the required coverage, local planning applications, the availability of power and problems with site access.
UK government project (Score:2)
Sounds like it's going to plan, as in spending as much government money as possible