Lord Carter calls mobile broadband providers to government meeting

In the latest meeting where the government will discuss the provision of everyone in the UK with a minimum connection speed of 2Mps in the next three years, Lord Carter has called in the providers of mobile broadband to help find a way forward, in pursuit of his pledge for his ‘broadband for all by 2012’.

The impending round table meeting that will mark that start of what looks to be quite a lengthy debate will now have all five of the main mobile broadband suppliers in the UK involved in the discussions. The addressing of the existing mobile broadband spectrum allocation, with the government current looking to spread part of the shares currently given to O2 and Vodafone with the other three suppliers, will be of particular importance in the meeting.

As these two companies were the first mobile phone operators in the UK, although O2 was originally known as Cellnet, they were given the largest part of the spectrum. The reason for Lord Carter wanting to use this spectrum to help in the provision of universal broadband access is because the spectrum range used by mobile broadband is a low frequency and allows for signals to travel over long distances, which is ideally suited to his needs.

Carter did hint in the release of the interim Digital Britain report last month that the government would be forced to step in if the mobile broadband supplier were unable to reach some sort of agreement regarding the allocation of spectrum by the end of April. The spectrum that has been allocated to Vodafone and O2 is, of course, something they don’t feel they should have to give up, unless they are given some kind of compensation for doing so, like segments of the spectrum that the move over to digital TV will free up.

There are currently a lot of doubts as to whether Lord Carter will be able to get the 900MHz frequency from Vodafone and O2 due to the fact that he had been unable to do so when he was the head of Ofcom.