back to article 'National roaming' law: Stubborn UK operators to be forced to share

Mobile operators in the UK could be forced to accept network-switching arrangements with their rivals, if legislation – reportedly expected to be unveiled this week – is pushed through Parliament. According to a number of reports in the Sunday newspapers this morning, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport wants to …

  1. Cliff

    EU roaming rates cap

    With the EU roaming rates having to be less outrageous, I can see a market gap for a (say) Romanian MVNO to offer better connectivity in the UK at let cost than the infrastructure incumbents. Anyone want to go halves on launching one if this doesn't get the companies actually working together for their 'valued' customers

    1. James 100

      Re: EU roaming rates cap

      Too late: several already offer UK roaming SIMs which can switch between networks for better coverage; my current ISP, Andrews & Arnold, offers them now. (2p/min when you're on O2, 10p/min if you roam to one of the other networks.) I think a few other companies do as well, though can't remember names off-hand.

      For that matter, Three had an arrangement to use T-Mobile and Orange to fill gaps in their coverage, although they've cut back on that after expanding their own network; now that EE and Three have combined their networks as MBNL, that probably isn't needed anyway.

      With EE and Three merging their networks as MBNL, while Vodafone and O2 pool theirs under a project name of "Cornerstone", will this really offer significant benefits anyway? A dual-SIM handset would give you access to both sets of base stations anyway!

      1. David Roberts

        Re: EU roaming rates cap

        No sign of merging at the moment - having spent a holiday in the Inner Hebrides recently with a 3 and Tesco (O2) handset we spent most of the time on "emergency calls only".

        Yes, they should allow UK hansets to roam in the UK on the same terms that they can roam in the rest of the EU.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Excellent if it happens...

    this should have been mandated as part of the license conditions. While a sub GHz band is pricier, the upper bands should not be an excuse for shoddy coverage.

    It can also be a revenue earner for the operators. If there aren't enough users in an insufficiently dense area, one operator could cover all visitors from other operators, making the infrastructure costs better justified.

    If the operators could get their heads out of their arses, they would see that a properly done law would make infrastructure decisions easier to make, help their bottom line as well as customers. The data on national roaming usage should tell them where their customer base needs coverage.

    Someone enlighten me but I cannot see any downside, beyond some work on the part of operators.

    1. Peter2 Silver badge

      Re: Excellent if it happens...

      Do you mean the license conditions attached to the licenses that the mobile providers spent an amount equivalent to ~60% of our yearly defence budget on? That exclusive of the cost of developing the infrastructure they bought the licenses for, of course.

      So, having spent quite literally tens of billions for licenses and more to build phone networks with those licenses, the companies in question are facing having to allow access to their competitors who chose to drop out of the bidding and didn't spend billions on licenses to the government and then more on building their own networks.

      Yes, sounds great for the competition. I'm sure they are fully in favour of the idea!

      The problem would be that the existing providers will be forced to give access at low prices that aren't going to justify any infrastructure development going forwards. I mean, why would you bother if you have to spend to put the masts in, but then have to give access to your competitors at market rates? (which are unlikely to justify the capital cost of the new mast)

      And that's just the existing infrastructure. How much do you think the same suppliers are going to be willing to spend on licenses and infrastructure for anything in the future?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Excellent if it happens...

        @ Peter2 I don't get it, you'd be roaming on to the network, so they would earn on it for calls their network is routing. Of course it shouldn't be cheaper for the competitor to roam than to build their own mast. But that cheaper would depend on the numbers. This is additional revenue, from your competitors.

        If 10 of your customers roam onto your competitor, it's fine to pay the premium. The coverage providing operator makes money from those 10 customers, just like an incoming international roamer would. The competitor would have to bear the cost, the end user cost would be the same as your normal minutes.

        Put another way, it's about monetizing the spectrum you *already* paid oodles for. If you paid extra for spectrum that is easier to provide coverage for, you'd make even more. This averages out the cost of spectrum AND cell density.

        Isn't the operator rhetoric on poor rural coverage about not having enough people using the infrastructure? And if this did ever make them spend less on spectrum, I'd rather have that, better coverage and possibly lower charges, rather than the money being spent on moats and duck houses.

        So I think it's great for competition, not for the competition.

        1. Peter2 Silver badge

          Re: Excellent if it happens...

          Forcing the operators to give access to infrastructure they spent tens of billions of pounds for exclusive licenses to is about as far away as monetising as you can get.

          If it made commercial sense, they'd have done it already.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Excellent if it happens...

            that's not much of an answer, Mvnos would not exist if this exclusive access as you put it key to provisioning coverage. the profit is probably not worth the technical trouble as well as having to get together and talk. They'd never agree to a rate on their own. May also need cell handover threshold tuning. Blocks of minutes might be a way to do it.

            My point is it isn't loss making as such, and worse case needs additional coverage deployments. Both are customer wins, and push operators to do what they should be anyway.

            The operators' non responsiveness says it all I think, they normally cry and wail when such things are announced, but they're quiet this time.

            I hope this happens and makes operators fix their shoddy data coverage, some squatting on prime spectrum (read O2 and their gprs). It's sad that places in the east have leapfrogged ahead on coverage while the UK lags behind.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Excellent if it happens...

            "having spent quite literally tens of billions for licenses and more to build phone networks with those licenses ..."

            "commercial sense ..."

            You're having a laugh.

            I'll tell you what makes commercial sense.

            Make a guess at the potential number of users on your network (maybe e.g. 5million averaged over the lifetime - starting from zero and staying there for a while)

            Make a guess at the plausible average annual revenue per user on your network, after allowing for handset payments etc. (maybe e.g. £100 per user per year in round numbers)

            Decide what the commercial lifetime of the network is. Say 5 years.

            That gives you the total revenue from the network over its lifetime. It's not that difficult to work out, unless you're living in a cloud cuckoo land of monetising football clips and other such pointlessness.

            My semi-random numbers above come to £2.5B max over the lifetime of the network. Obviously that number has to cover not just the licence costs but the new infrastructure too, and all the other up front and ongoing costs.

            Nobody forced the operators to bid the ridiculous amounts they did in the 3G auctions in the UK (totalling £20B+, for those who may not remember).

            What was your point about commercial sense?

        2. Terry Barnes

          Re: Excellent if it happens...

          The operators make far less money for a wholesale call than they do for a retail call. It messes with the economics and will tend to provide an incentive to not build out network.

          If you look at fixed line telecoms, the requirement on BT to provide wholesale access to its network and regulation then setting the charges for that access at a low rate has resulted in very few telcos building their own. It has worked in that there is lots of competition and cheap prices in the UK, but not much infrastructure competition. That's different to the mobile market today and this new rule, if introduced, would tend to make the economics of buy/build more like the fixed market.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Excellent if it happens...@Peter2

        "So, having spent quite literally tens of billions for licenses "

        The stupidity of the major networks in over-bidding for licences should be the problem of those companies' investors, not a justification for shoddy service to me many years later. Is that a challenging idea for you?

        And it's not like the MNO's give a tinker's cuss about throwing money away. Vodafone for example have managed serial writedowns totalling something of the order fifty billion quid over the period since 2005, and on that basis I think they can more than afford a little extra competition, and investing a bit to make their customer's lives better, instead of their recalcitrant refusal to fix a fairly simple problem. I say good luck to Sajid Javid, because the MNO's have had the chance to forge their own solution, and they've decided not to bother. In all likelihood this won't get passed because civil servants take forever to draft or amend legislation, and our idle and underworked MPs won't get round to rubber stamping it before next May's musical chairs, but its still an excellent idea.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Excellent if it happens...@Peter2

          There is a tautology here - 4G capacity is lacking but we want operators to share capacity????

          I think that you will find that the Government happily pocketed that money in exchange for a license with a set of conditions.

          If the conditions are changed, presumably the government will hand back a chunk of cash?

          If this were you and your boss asked you to do some additional work for free you'd jump at the chance, no? All the core networks and radio networks sould need to be connected up and tested or billing would be a nightmare, or 'bill shock' would rise as 3 charge you massive amounts for data which EE would have blocked as you were over your monthly allowance. Your free spotify would suddenly become 'no spotify' or 'pricy spotify' and do you expect it would now become Orange/O2/Vodafone/3/EE Wednesdays? The devil is in the details and the details are messy and expensive.

          The government alrerady allocated £150 million to fix not-spots via the Mobile Infrastructure Programme, administered by Arqiva. The aim is to create cost effective sites that all operators can share. Perhaps if they stopped LAs from denying permission for extra antennas on existing sites (for site sharing) or for new sites then we could make progress.

          Contact Arqiva and ask them to crack on!

      3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Excellent if it happens...

        So, having spent quite literally tens of billions for licenses and more to build phone networks with those licenses

        I think you'll find that those licences were accounted for in a very tax-efficient way.

        Roaming for voice can be done within the existing framework. O2 Germany used it extensively during its buildout. The key is to set the fee high enough to encourage all parties to continue building: networks using roaming should have an incentive to improve their own infrastructure; networks providing roaming should be rewarded for the infrastructure they've built and given incentive to do more. Equilibrium would be reached at some point.

        Data, as ever, is a different matter because it can be a much scarcer resource.

    2. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Excellent if it happens...

      Popcorn please.

      Most UK operator SIMs have a programmed blacklist which contains some or all competitors so that the mobile never tries to camp onto their networks. In theory, if the phone has a running SIM toolkit app, it should be possible to reprogram that remotely (this was done when Orange became EE). In practice, this may end up with a sequence of clusterf***s, so popcorn please...

    3. calmeilles

      Re: Excellent if it happens...

      There may be a mild irony in that early license conditions prohibited operators from implementing local roaming. This forced them to erect separate networks which is what government considered to be in the best interests of fostering competition.

      1. Phil_Evans

        Re: Excellent if it happens...

        Yes and having now established both a pecking order and 'get awf my land' agreements with each other, it's time to remember that customer service thing in the back of the wardrobe. Time comes when the investor party comes to an end and it's time to start serving breakfast again.

        Funny that when a market gets saturated, nicking each other's customers seems to comes well down in the list below screwing said customer. Or nospot wannabe customer. Or whatever.

    4. Expectingtheworst

      Re: Excellent if it happens...

      Coverage in most of rural Norfolk is virtually non existent.

      My local Vodafone transmitter in miles away from the major block of villages I live in. 3 villages almost touching and extending along a major B road for 1.5 miles with a combined population of about 5,000.

      I have no coverage, although there are small reception areas, but theses seem to vary day to day.

      However Vodafone do alright as they sell little boxes to attach to your broadband at £50+ a go. No cost in providing transmitters, but a good income in box sales. However only registered users can access these boxes, so the only signal I get is 50ft round my house. Very helpful.

      Pass the roaming law quickly, or force them to give full coverage - I don't get a lower monthly call rate for no local signal !

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There's an existing model

    We could use the railways as a model here. We could create a MobeTrack or CellTrack who do the infrastructure and then pour money into it via something like PFI. The carriers then get to act as middle men pushing packets around. Hey we can probably bin O2 etc and just have ISPs.

    Oh, just remembered that's the way POTS n broadband etc works with BT OpenReach.

    Cool, we have two models on how to do this - let's sit back and watch the race to the bottom.

    Cheers

    Jon

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "...works with BT"

      I take it you use the term "works" loosely here ;-)

      As an example, I've just "upgraded" to VDSL as BT, as the incumbent, have been paid government money (under BDUK) to bring "Superfast" broadband to our village. Trouble is, the cabinet they "installed" is in another village about a mile away and the upload speeds are now worse than they were before (0.67 Mbps). Download speeds are slightly better, but I don't call 14 Mbps "Superfast" (I was prepared to pay for the 80 Mbps band) and the people at the other end of the village will be lucky to get 6.

  4. fridaynightsmoke
    Facepalm

    Well done, you'll break the market.

    If every network in the land offers exactly the same signal everywhere, and if building a mast allows the customers of every network to benefit from it; then what possible incentive is there for any network to build any more masts?

    1. davidp231

      Re: Well done, you'll break the market.

      Or bother to have multiple networks in the first place.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Well done, you'll break the market.

        because it would be cheaper to have your own mast.

        The operators probably don't like it because they would have to allow or request customers to leave their contracts early if they end up making a lot of calls from their network's notspots after signing up to a new contract, and also if they're using older or cheaper phones with worse signal sensitivity.

        They might all need to agree some kind of seamless contract transfer if their customer ends up using too many non-network provided minutes, because their own network's coverage is poor, but they've shoved a new iThingy on contract.

        It is similar to the mobile termination fees issue, where three had a lot more externally terminated calls, whereas it was more evened out for Voda, and O2. I don;t know how the landscape is now post EE merger.

  5. JassMan

    French mobes aren't just better when roaming internationally

    All the French operators support a virtual network called F-Contact on their transmitters which clients of all the others can use when their own network has a poor signal. It only operates in "zones blanches" where operators find it hard to justify the capital expenditure of all networks having full coverage. OK, the only outgoing calls you can make on F-Contact are to the emergency services, but you can text a friend and get them to call you back.

    Logically there should be no reason why UK operators can't get together to provide the same service.

    fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_blanche

  6. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    This is done in the US

    This is done in the US. But here, it was due to market forces due to anything else. 10 years ago, the "big 4" hadn't built out as much coverage or bought up as many carriers as they have now. They all had significant coverage gaps filled in by roaming, and plans began to include free in-US roaming. This also ended up incentivizing the carriers to build out coverage; a coverage hole doesn't directly cost the carrier anything, a coverage hole where tons of people are roaming on another carrier does.

    T-Mobile tends to provide less roaming coverage but roams on some GSM carriers; Sprint roams on every available CDMA carrier pretty much and some LTE roaming; Verizon roams on Sprint and regional CDMA carriers (with LTE on quite a few); AT&T roams on T-Mobile and regional GSM carriers (some of this is EDGE, some HSPA+). If you pick a regional carrier it'll usually include some kind of roaming coverage too.

    But, if roaming is not happening between networks there, it really is to everyone's benefit to get it going. I've seen the coverage maps for UK and they all have holes this'd help fill in. And, it might get the carriers to improve their own coverage out better too.

  7. Jamie Jones Silver badge

    Roaming onto UK networks

    I'm old and ugly enough to remember when you couldn't even send a text to another network.

    And as international agreements came before National ones, for a while we could text anyone in the world, as long as they weren't in the Uk on a rival operator..

    Unrelated, but reminds me of when the UK's public internet link to the UK universities had to go via America and back - for bureaucratic rather than technical reasons.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Provide a basic GSM service to all FIRST

    In the first instance UK operators should be compelled to provide basic GSM coverage to their existing 'obligation' level filling in every 'inhabited by considerably more than one bloke and a sheep' 10km square on the OS map with some basic service. There are a few tens of square miles of rolling countryside in Yorkshire crossed by a number of B roads, with a lot of local and tourist trafic and a couple of dozen villages where there is only very marginal GSM coverage from one operator. The cell sites are less than optimal in location, over the hill in many cases leaving vaste swathes seekign out base stations 10 miles away or more. Use a Nokia 6310 with a car kit and an aerial on the car roof and you get patchy coverage, anything vaguely modern and its often one bar or no signal. After 20 years of GSM it's pathetic!

  9. bpfh
    Headmaster

    French mobes in France

    Already have this national roaming, or network sharing, where a black area for operator, say Bouygyes Telecom, will be covered as roaming by say Orange (in some areas in the Dordogne), but on the other side of France, Bouygtel will provide roaming coverage for Orange users - all free, or invoiced at the standard contract rates of your subscription, on the basis that a legally mandated percentage of mobile coverage may be very difficult, so in the low value areas, the big 3 operators (BT, Orange, SFR) sign national roaming agreements to use each other's antenna for the remaining 2-3% of their missing coverage, so combined coverage, dedicated + national roaming per operator licence gets to the mandated 98 or 99% (or whatever, I forget) national coverage, without excessive infrastructure investment + fines from the regulator.

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