Coverage. It’s always a hot topic. Check your local paper and we’re prepared to lay money on the fact that those residents groups opposing a new mast will be secretly sitting at home, cursing the lack of a decent signal. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has promised £150 million of public money to improve signal coverage to ensure that 99% of the country. The money will go into adding more sites for masts and, in particular, increasing the patchy coverage in urban areas.
The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones reports that smaller, more unobtrusive cells could be the way forward. Picochip, a company manfacturing femtocells, has stated that 70,000 new cells would be needed in London to bring 4G coverage to the city, but these could be smaller cells which are hidden in roads and on buildings.
George Osbourne told The Telegraph that..
2.5 million people who don’t have any phone reception. We are working with Ofcom, we are committing today to help roll out that infrastructure. I know sometimes we think of infrastructure as a road or a railway, and that is important, but these days infrastructure is also broadband or mobile phone telephony. [It is] not just so that families can keep in touch with each other but so that businesses can operate in remoter areas and we can have a vibrant economy not just in the City of London or the south east of England.
Great spot in the Chancellors [shabby] proposals for growth – this was badly needed investment anyway and I’d question the use of public money to support the network investment needs of the corporate giants, unless it reduced bills for the consumer at the same time.
It is inevitable that this will result in many new masts – I recall the recent coolsmartphone post on fake tree and telegraph mast examples of mast design. Maybe there should be a mast design competition, like the recent power-line pylon design competition. As a planner I wonder if the iphone/android have changed peoples opinions, or whether or not the same entrenched nimby, health risk averse objectors will still come out in force! Either way, might get an iphone 5 to get some benefit from being involved in the middle – I’m fed up waiting for a legitimate WP7 mango upgrade (HTC Mozart, Orange UK) 🙂