Ministers in the UK government are mulling a national roaming scheme under which operators could be forced to share their networks to tackle the ‘not spots’ in rural Britain.
These ‘not spots’ or ‘blacksport’ areas are remote areas in rural Britain where hardly a couple of mobile network are available and calls are drop frequently mid-conversation. There have been cases when people don’t even find any signal at all.
New Culture Secretary Sajid Javid wants mobile operators to roll out national roaming under which they will be sharing their networks in rural areas and customers will easily be able to switch to an alternative network if their own network isn’t available.
The government is already investing up to £150 million to improve mobile coverage in rural areas or areas with low coverage; however, the government is looking to do more.
“The Government has made clear it wants to ensure the UK has world-class mobile phone coverage as part of our investment in infrastructure for the long term economic plan”, said A spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Mobile operators are none too pleased with the idea and have claimed that network sharing could become a roadblock and stop mobile phone companies from improving their own networks. They claim that availability of other network because of network sharing would leave them with little incentive to invest in rural areas by installing their own masts.
They have also warned that customers may be required to pay out higher charges if such a scheme is implemented as there could be costs involved in deploying it in the first place.
