3UK CEO confident of LTE spectrum auction next year

The timetable for the UK LTE spectrum auction should become available later this year, according to David Dyson, the recently appointed CEO of 3UK. This should lead to the auction taking place in 2012, Dyson said, despite ongoing opposition from other UK mobile network operators to the proposed auction rules. According to Dyson, the other operators are dragging their feet because of requirements that they start paying licence fees for the 2G spectrum they have refarmed for 3G usage after the LTE auction process is complete. These licensing costs could amount to around £300 million per year for each operator that refarms. "We carry nearly 50 per cent of the UK's mobile data traffic and yet we have the smallest amount of spectrum," Dyson told Mobile Today. "One way the other networks have of slowing us down is to delay the auction, so that we hit congestion problems, which might force us to lower the value of our proposition." Article