UK cellcos reach agreement on 4G, as Ofcom speeds up spectrum clearance

Just a few weeks after the UK government stepped in to broker a ‘stand-still agreement’ ensuring no legal action would be undertaken for a month while negotiations continued between the country’s mobile operators regarding 4G deployments, a more permanent deal has now reportedly been reached. Following crunch talks held between the four cellcos – EE, O2 UK, Vodafone UK and Hutchison 3G UK – plus the new secretary of state for culture and media, Maria Miller, and regulator Ofcom, the latter has welcomed what it claimed was ‘the significant progress that has been made in moving forward the delivery of competitive 4G mobile services across the UK’. The regulator has revealed that under the terms of the deal reached between itself and mobile operators, it will still launch its 4G auction as planned at the end of this year, but now Ofcom expects that competitive fourth-generation services will be operational in the first half of 2013, rather than by the end of that year

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OVETEL UK cellcos reach agreement on 4G, as Ofcom speeds up spectrum clearance