Mobile phone company Three UK has recently added a new option for anyone looking to sign up for mobile broadband. There is now a 40 GB data plan, costing around £45 a month, double the previous allowance of 20 GB (which admittedly only cost between £21 and £23 a month). There are several limitations however, as […]
Smartphones are ubiquitous and are one of the primary means for us to get online these days – more so than laptops and computers for any people. Earlier this month, a key moment in smartphone Internet use passed most of us by…as the title suggests, more people use smartphones than laptops for getting online in the UK […]
Further to my earlier post, here’s some rather useful perspective from Analysys Mason’s spectrum specialist Morgan Mullooly. Ofcom’s decision is really rather startling – if not completely unexpected. Although Ofcom gave an initial informal knee- jerk head-nod to the proposal [to permit EE to use its 1800MHz spectrum for LTE] when it was first raised, […]
The team at Vodafone UK are seriously annoyed. Enough to use some rather emotive language when describing the behaviour of the industry’s regulator, Ofcom. What’s Ofcom done wrong this time? They’ve allowed Everything Everywhere (i.e. T-Mobile and Orange) to use their existing 1800 MHz spectrum for 4G services. The short story being that, theoretically, Everything […]
I was pleased to come across this post from today’s Telegraph pointing out that Ofcom, the generally ineffectual UK telecoms regulator, has finally got the message. Here’s the overview: Calls to ‘freephone’ 0800 numbers currently cost up to 21p a minute from mobile phones, despite being free from BT landlines. Ofcom wants to make them […]
Thank you to Steve Kennedy who sent in this overview of the developments going on in the whitespace spectrum segment of the industry that the geeks amongst us will certainly appreciate. Over to Steve: – – – – – Ofcom, the ‘super’ regulator that looks after broadcasting, radio, and telecoms amongt other things has made […]
Ofcom was planning to reduce the termination charges of the UK MNOs to 5.1p per minute by 2010/2011. Now the Competition Commission have ruled the termination rate should be 4p (apart from 3 the 5th 3G operator who gets to chatge 4.4p). The Competition Appeal Tribunal passed the complaint to the Competition Commission after 3 […]
Back in 2006, a MIR reader’s daughter got a text message. And another. And another. And woosh. Across what appeared to be a few minutes, she was text-bombed. Whether by mistake or by design, she ended up with a heck of a lot of premium rate texts being delivered to her handset. The reader describes […]
Watchdog Ofcom has been taking a look at how much we’re spending on telecoms these days and rather happily has discovered we’re paying less but actually getting more for our money – we’re paying about £1.50 less than we were last year on our communications – mobile, broadband etc – and about £4.30 less than […]
Guess what? The mobile industry is actually doing something right for once. Yep, according to watchdog Ofcom, the system of self regulation operators have in place to stop kids getting their hands on adult material before they’re 18 is working out fine, although it did administer a gentle slap on the wrist over information: apparently […]
When operators bought their 3G licences back in 2000, they all promised to get coverage to 80 percent of the population by the end of last year. And they all managed it too – with the exception of O2, who got a bit of a slap on the wrist from the regulator after it missed […]
If you’ve been reading the news about Emirates and Qantas’ launches of in-flight mobile access and wondering when such mile-high talk and text would be coming to the UK, Ofcom has the answer. The regulator has announced that it will permit mobiles in aircraft as long as the airline has the backing of either the […]