Picture the scene. You’re an app developer, with a small team based in a medium-sized Midlands town. 4G and 5G coverage has yet to reach the area. You’ve managed to court the attention of a London investor, and he (for it is usually a man, and he’s usually from London) agrees to come up to look at the tech.
He arrives in a fit of pique. Signal was so patchy on the two-hour, delayed West Coat Mainline trip from a nightmarish Euston he couldn’t get any work done. Once he got there, it was fiendishly difficult to find your office, because WhatsApp calls cut out and Google Maps played up.
But at last he is here: you offer him coffee and get him set up on the app. Except — the App Store says it’ll be 20 minutes to download to his phone. To pass the time, he clicks on the pitch deck PDF you sent him — but it takes an age to open. You resort to offering him more coffee; you even reach for the posh biscuits you save for special occasions — but even that may fail to turn things around. The whole effort has proved a waste of time.
This is, admittedly, a contrived scenario. But something not too dissimilar has happened to startups in towns across the UK. A dearth of 4G and 5G coverage may not stop you coming up with an idea, assembling a team, building a plan. But when it comes to scaling that up, seeking investment, working with clients and customers, it can quickly become a major stumbling block.
That is why today’s announcement of a huge merger between Vodafone and Three should come as welcome news to tech firms in the regions of the UK. Both Voda and Three have said that separately, they lack the surplus cash needed to invest in big infrastructure projects like the deployment of 5G in the regions. But combined, the two telcos have promised to set aside as much as £11bn for big upgrades and rollouts across the country.
The CMA has gone as far as to say the competition concerns, from a consumer perspective, are outweighed by the material improvements in user experience derived from these upgrades — and in any case the watchdog has set out conditions, including three-year caps to mobile tariffs, to ensure that Vodafone is deploying its resources prudently rather than raking in cash for shareholders.
Faster, more reliable mobile data is not the sexiest topic in the world. But it gets talked about so much in the UK because the challenges of going without it are so widespread — significantly worse than the average European country. The dream scenario is that, a decade hence, none of us is talking about it because we all take it for granted. And so it doesn’t get in the way of companies’ growth and investment ambitions.
When I spoke to Three CEO Robert Finnegan about the deal this morning, he put it to me this way.
“You’re not going to attract inward investment into parts of the UK where you have poor quality mobile infrastructure,” he said.
“I was in Belfast earlier this year and 5G coverage was 20%, it’s tiny. And I happened to be in Boston at the weekend where 5G was everywhere. It was in the rural areas; it was in the centre of cities; it was even inside buildings where there were very large outer walls.
“And that’s where we need to get to. We’re lagging way behind not just the US but the rest of Europe in terms of where we rank from a mobile quality infrastructure point of view. That changes today.”
Finnegan is right — and I hope now that the merged entity delivers on its promise. The devil will of course be in the detail, and it will be a few months yet before this merger is wrapped up, but better connectivity is the tide that should lift all boats in the UK’s regions and – for risk of mixing my metaphors – put them on a level playing field.
Register for Free
Get daily updates and enjoy an ad-reduced experience.
Already have an account? Log in
