August 12, 2005
Ofcom's first "technology neutral" auction
Peter Judge for The Guardian looks at a new technology that is aiming to cut the cost of mobile calls by letting people choose which cell to use.
"Next year, if a bright idea takes off, your mobile could spontaneously offer you cheaper calls. New operators are planning to put low-power transmitters in railway stations and shopping centres. When your mobile gets within 200 metres, it will pick up the new cell, you can roam to it and the provider will give you mobile calls at the price you would expect to pay for landline calls.
"We're champing at the bit," says Martin Wren-Hilton, chief executive of Coffee Telecom. "It's a great opportunity for consumers to have more choice." Coffee has been developing the service at its Richmond office for the past two years, says Wren-Hilton, a 39-year-old entrepreneur who is said to have had a hand in the creation of mobile phone top-up cards.
... The service is similar to BT's Fusion, which lets a cellphone roam to a Bluetooth base station and (in a future version) a Wi-Fi hotspot. But, unlike Fusion and other "fixed-mobile convergence" services, it uses the same GSM technology as your existing phone service - and it works with existing handsets.
Independent micro-cells have not been possible before, because the GSM
radio spectrum is licensed to the big operators. Sometime in the next year, however, Ofcom, the regulator, will auction off enough spectrum for small operators such as Coffee to do their own thing.
... It's Ofcom's first "technology neutral" auction. Whoever gets the licences - for two bands at 1.78 GHz and 1.88 GHz - can use any technology, as long as they keep the power below 200mw. frequencies."
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