Low mobile phone prices are great but when the network becomes a ‘notwork’ it costs us all

The speed and quality of a connection is vital – now network operators seem to have given up

‘The industry needs to get its house in order too, by making better investment decisions’

Welcome to “notspot UK”. Like the lobsters in the proverbial pot, we barely notice how our mobile networks are degrading but regular visitors will tell you it gets worse every time. The Shared Rural Network, the £1bn project to plug the gaps, with its paltry target of 2Mbps, is behind target. Even in urban areas, networks seem to have given up.

This doesn’t make sense at first glance. How many industries are guaranteed a tenner a month from us, at least, for every month until we die? Not pubs, restaurants and certainly not Netflix.

The reason we’re stuck in a doom loop is the equation of investment and reward. “The rewards of providing network service simply don’t match the value contributed to the economy,” explains Stephen Howard of Communication Chambers. “So, we shouldn’t be surprised if there’s not as much of it provided as we would like.”

We acutely feel the quality of our mobile service. Electricity just needs to be available while water just needs to be clean. With data, the speed and quality of the connection really does matter. But when operators announce they’re going to beef up their infrastructure, the City clobbers them.

“You and I would pay £100 a month for good mobile connectivity. At most we generally pay £15, because of competitive pressures,” explains

William Webb, the industry gadfly who at Ofcom two decades ago encouraged the regulator to embrace the auction model. Today, he wants the old strategy he devised to be ripped up. Low prices are great, of course, but when the network becomes a notwork, it’s no bargain at all.

So what can we do? Webb has joined forces with one of the original architects of the single market for mobile in Europe, Stephen Temple, to develop alternatives. “What we’re getting is a sub-standard network infrastructure and sub-optimal economic spectrum efficiency,” they write. Ofcom gets both barrels. Today, the regulator pockets the proceeds of auctions and passes them on to the Treasury. Instead it should scrap fees, and get tough on coverage “notspots”.

Ofcom should also replace vague “best effort” commitments from mobile operators with guaranteed data speed. No one is spared. The industry needs to get its house in order too, by making better investment decisions. The problem with 5G was that the clever boffins wanted to push their latest, whizz bang lab inventions and created a very fast but expensive network. The result was that 5G was the answer to a question nobody was asking. Mobile operators would much rather have an efficient system that keeps their costs down, and your bills low. Punters prefer to have a 20 Mb/s connection that’s reliably there when you need it, rather than 500 Mb/s you see once in a blue moon.

No one cares which “G” it is, or if it’s Wifi, so long as we’re connecting. So mandating 5G no longer makes any sense. “The long-term commercial and strategic value of 5G will be determined by whether it becomes more than just a faster version of 4G,” the National Infrastructure noted last month. Some left-field ideas must be embraced, too. Ofcom could think about encouraging a national Wifi roaming network, much like students enjoy today with Eduroam. Today, the Ofcom-designed market of four operators sees two of them, Vodafone and Three, as “also rans” who claim investments return less than the cost of capital. They want to merge, to create one combined network that’s slightly larger than EE and O2 are today.

The key difference that the UK enjoys is a vigorous wholesale market with millions choosing to use virtual operators (MVNOS) like Lebara, Tesco and Sky. Cumulatively this adds up to a bigger operator than Three. These virtual operators are better off with three strong networks providing wholesale, than four, reckons the analysis firm Enders. And with plastic Sim cards being superseded by QR codes, making switching easier, they fancy grabbing more of the market. Ultimately we don’t get the networks we deserve, just the ones we pay for.