The wind is changing – a groundswell of support for national roaming was evident at MWC, suggesting that national regulators are ready to embrace this key tactic. WTL has long advocated national roaming and infrastructure sharing. Find out the latest from Barcelona.
While product and solution announcements are welcome, MWC also provides an opportunity to discuss policy and the evolution of regulation. Both technical solutions and policy instruments are required to build a flourishing market and there’s no area more important for this than the licensing frameworks established by national regulators. Of course, that’s because the spectrum required for the delivery of mobile services is a national asset, one that needs to be protected and used widely.
However, while the traditional model has essentially been a zero-sum game, in which all spectrum is allocated to a handful of providers in one-off license awards, there are signs that attitudes are changing in the regulatory and operator community. The reasons for this are clear. Those lucky enough to have been awarded national spectrum licenses are incentivised to invest in the most populous areas first.
That’s entirely logical – but the result is that coverage is slow to spread to remote regions and it may even be impractical for a national operator to take these steps, considering the cost of additional investment. Coverage gaps are the inevitable result, an issue we’ve been trying to tackle with Vivada for some time now.
One solution is to allow infrastructure sharing and national roaming, so that providers can access spectrum as a shared resource, across open and common RAN and core assets. This is an approach for which we have been arguing for several years, so it’s particularly pleasing to have heard so much on the subject. Perhaps the most eye-catching was the announcement during a Facebook-hosted event that Telefonica and Facebook are stakeholders in a major infrastructure sharing initiative in Peru, This article reveals more.
It’s difficult to emphasise how important this topic is. Indeed, it’s probably the single largest barrier to really transforming connectivity options for those left behind in the digital divide. We’ve addressed cost concerns, we’ve solved the backhaul issue, and we’ve enabled self-contained delivery with autonomous power supplies for off-grid locations – but the central problems of access to scarce spectrum and infrastructure sharing need to be addressed. MWC 19 showed that there is gathering momentum behind addressing these key issues.
