Mandelson summons mobile giants

Lord Mandelson has ordered the UK’s five major mobile networks to attend a summit meeting, in an attempt to secure government plans for fast broadband roll-out by 2012

Chief executives of the networks O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 will attend the meeting, which is designed to ‘bang some heads together’, the Guardian reported.

The business secretary is keen to prepare for the implementation of the recommendations in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report.

The report said the implementation of universal broadband access would depend on much wider use of mobile broadband, so that remote parts of Britain would be able to access a signal for the first time.

This would rely on the five networks reaching a deal over the use of 900MHz wireless spectrum that was granted to the two original networks – Vodafone and O2 – when they started operating in the 1980s.

A deal to share this section of the airwaves needs to be reached before the government can sell off frequencies it will get back when the analogue television signal is switched off in 2012.

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