The UK’s mobile market is evolving. Both Ofcom and the Government have made the right decision to examine what these changes mean in order to maintain a highly competitive market that provides value to consumers. From the mobile network operators’ standpoint, the key to achieving this is to promote a strong investment environment to facilitate the build of 4G and 5G, while ensuring all market actors are bound by fair and balanced regulation.
Ofcom has published its ‘Future approach to mobile markets’ and running to around 300 pages its review is certainly comprehensive and contains a lot of interesting data. Ofcom estimates that 94% UK premises can now receive Fixed Wireless Access, broadband via mobile signal, through the UK’s Mobile Network Operators. This includes 528,00 premises without access to reasonable broadband. In the UK, there have been 150 Mobile Virtual Network Operators, MVNOs, that have been launched over the past 10 years. Many of these operators offer innovative Internet of Things applications such as home security.
The paper’s central theme is how the market has delivered mobile consumers with the main drivers of competition being network quality and price.
As the Government wrestles with the cost of living crisis, it will be heartening for them to read Ofcom’s analysis which “shows that in comparison with France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the USA, the UK had the lowest standalone mobile prices in 2020” and that UK customers have been ‘getting more for less’. Over the last 10 years or so, mobile operators have invested about £2.5bn every year in 4G capacity and coverage, enabling 20 times growth in mobile data traffic, while prices have been falling.
