#crimsontide is coming for your mobile bill

This piece from Tom Watson is excellent. I can’t think of more than one other pol who understands mobile networks as well, and the other one knows more about fixed. Perhaps Watson is just well advised, but then picking good advice is a very important skill. On this strength, he’s the second best mobile analyst in the Northern Soul community.

He doesn’t, though, link to the news story that kicked the whole thing off. It’s here, at the FT. Apparently, David Cameron has:

has ordered ministers to improve mobile phone coverage across the countryside after becoming frustrated about the lack of reception in the often core Conservative-voting territories.

Ordered, eh? I thought he believed that free markets work. Presumably the Ministry of Medium Machine Building will be assigned to implement this decisive contribution to socialism. Maybe Cameron will show up at work to provide me with on-site guidance, like the North Koreans do.

The motivation is purely personal:

“We were requested to meet Maria Miller after complaints from David Cameron and Owen Paterson that calls were dropping,” said one. “Apparently this was an issue that grabbed the attention of the cabinet.”

Imagine the crimson tide that must have flowed. It’s also crassly cynical:

Mobile groups were asked to examine the costs of coverage to villages in Shropshire, Dorset and Norfolk – all with almost exclusively Conservative MPs – although work then focused on just using Shropshire as a pilot area.

Cameron’s solution, as Watson and the FT both say, is to impose a national roaming requirement on the networks. So if your phone doesn’t find Vodafone, it picks the next strongest signal, like it does under international roaming. This sounds nice, but it’s not as clever as all that. First of all, it doesn’t help you if there is no coverage from any network.

Between the 5 or 4 UK networks, depending on whether you still count Orange and T-Mobile as independent entities, there are actually only two-and-a-half sets of so-called passive infrastructure like land, towers, power and such. Vodafone and O2 share theirs under Project Cornerstone, T-Mobile and 3UK under Mobile Broadband Network Ltd, and EE’s 4G network is mostly parallel to MBNL, but also includes some original Orange sites outside it. There is also some complexity regarding how deep the sharing goes, but this is beside the point.

As a result of this, you’re less likely to find places where only one operator has coverage. Rather, you’re likely to get a dichotomy between places where both broad alliances are present, and none are.

Secondly, roaming in the mobile world implies compensation between carriers. If this is not regulated, it will be agonisingly expensive, because it’s intrinsically like a cartel. There’s no point unless everyone does it, which means there is no meaningful competition. The EU’s toughest women have spent a decade grinding this back cent by cent in the international domain. Watson notices this, which puts him way beyond most people.

Thirdly, if you can push traffic onto the competition and make a turn on the roaming, you’ll do it, so this gets rid of an incentive to build out more infrastructure. By now you’re probably wondering why we bothered to build four networks. The answer is that it would probably have been a good idea to share, but doing so requires the government to structure the market so that somebody will still bother to build out across the country. Back in the late 80s, infrastructure sharing wasn’t ideologically fashionable to say the least, and the successful example of fixed-line unbundling didn’t exist. It’s also true, though, that nobody then had any idea how this was going to turn out.

So here’s your problem: just throwing the switch on national roaming is rather like having infrastructure sharing, but without a population-coverage requirement, and also rather like unregulated international roaming. But there’s worse!

OK, who do you think will carry the most inbound roaming traffic? Obviously, the network with the most rural coverage. This won’t be the same as the one with the most base stations, because if you have spectrum in the original 900MHz GSM band, or even lower, in the 800MHz ex-TV band when that becomes available or even the 600s when they get auctioned, you automatically get a huge coverage boost from the fundamental principles of radio theory. You pay for this with a capacity/coverage tradeoff, though, so it might not please the countryside that much.

But it will make smaller operators subsidise bigger ones. This is a fundamental reality of a telecoms termination fee regime, where the network originating a call pays the network where it ends up. As a result, termination has monopolistic effects and is always regulated. OFCOM and the Euro-regulators have spent most of the last decade grinding it back. And now, we have a policy initiative that looks a lot like unregulated termination, with the downsides of roaming and of network sharing chucked in.

The worst of it, though, is the grisly contrast with the utter shambles of Cameron’s Broadband Delivery UK policy, which has so far failed to give a single contract to anyone other than BT and has also failed to deploy any end-user fibre. At the same time, community broadband projects that get public funding aren’t allowed to provide mobile operators with backhaul – i.e. the connectivity from the base station to somewhere civilised.

The market for very high speed leased lines, which is what you need, is officially unregulated even though in 85% of the UK there is a BT monopoly and in the rest, the only competitor is Vodafone, which can’t be expected to help its mobile competitors. You can follow this at BT whistleblower Broken Telephone‘s fine blog – I particularly like the bit where BT got central government money to overbuild a network the Welsh built with Welsh Assembly funds.

There are good things you can do with national roaming. Certain niche MVNO offerings and Machine-to-Machine applications can benefit. This guy used to sell Manx SIM cards to people who worried about per-operator black spots, but I think OFCOM made him stop for some reason. T-Mobile Netherlands used to do the same thing, but in tens of thousands, for machines. But this is niche stuff. Update: Revk points out that under the new EU rules, foreigners would get free roaming while UK residents would pay. I’d forgotten his mob offers you the option of switching to Vodafone.nl if you’re out of footprint.

Oh, and Tom Watson should be back in the shadow cabinet.

20 Comments on "#crimsontide is coming for your mobile bill"


  1. I am genuinely somewhat surprised that the PM has a COTS mobile running on a genuine COTS mobile network. Does he not at least get an Airwave handset? I suppose he can’t play Angry Farages on one of them?
    Beyond that I think this is a genuinely interesting insight into the validity of the ‘you can get an Oxford PPE degree by being superficially plausible and articulate without actually being very bright’ hypothesis which is one I have never been certain of the truth or falsity of.

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    1. Angela Merkel had a TEMPEST certified smartphone issued by the German government cybercops, but she was intercepted on a commercial device paid for by her political party. I imagine politicians don’t always want their conversations to go through official channels, especially those relating to party rather than government business.

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      1. also presumably the super-secret scrambled mobiles aren’t that much use for sending matey texts to Rebekah Brooks and Jeremy Clarkson.

        WIth respect to “you can get an Oxford PPE degree by being superficially plausible and articulate without actually being very bright”, I can’t be bothered to dig up the blog post when I went through this, but it’s not quite that.

        You can get more or less any degree without being very bright if you can be bothered to do the work and aren’t aiming for the top marks. The problem with the PPE degree is not so much that the people who take it aren’t bright – they generally are – as that it massively teaches you (by the way the course is set up) that if you are bright, you can pick up a bluffer’s modicum on more or less any subject in the course of a week, and that if you are plausible and articulate you can usually get away with it. If you’re not bright enough to pick things up quickly then PPE can be a hellish experience, but if you are then you quickly learn that the marginal reward for getting real expertise is small relative to the marginal cost (and they teach you about marginal returns in the first term to make sure you understand). It’s what the degree is meant for – it’s meant to turn out quick-thinking generalists who can express themselves clearly, for the benefit of the 1960s Civil Service fast track.

        And such people are still needed – at the end of the day, if the Prime Minister understood mobile phone roaming in detail, you’d kind of worry what he was missing. But what Cameron (and Gove, and Johnson) seems to be bad at is letting his temper run away with him, as Alex implies, and suddenly fixating on a particular magic bullet solution that popped up in his reading. This is a dangerous failure mode of PPE generalists, as then all the plausibility and articulacy skills are brought to bear in promoting the Favourite Thing. Usually this tendency is beaten out of them during their apprenticeships in management consultancy, banking or the civil service, but Cameron has never had a proper job (other than that PR sinecure) and Gove and Johnson were both journalists, which reinforces the pathological behaviour rather than punishing it.

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        1. I would also add that I think it was Richard J who pointed out to me that one of the crucial life skills that you learn as Oxford PPE but hardly anywhere else, is how to participate in and direct a small meeting on a technical subject, while hung over or drunk.

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          1. Accenture teach you that as well, from memory, being also essentially in the business of turning out superficially plausible generalists.


        2. I think this is genuinely an insight I haven’t had before (the only thing I think I ever knew about PPE is that the E doesn’t involve much maths) but doesn’t ‘we have n competing companies, let’s force them to cooperate’ fall outside what one would consider understanding mobile phone roaming in detail?
          I mean, if he’s going to say that, why not also say ‘the selection in the village shop where I’m staying is kind of crap, let’s force the major 4 supermarkets to cooperate and deliver here’?

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          1. .doesn’t ‘we have n competing companies, let’s force them to cooperate’ fall outside what one would consider understanding mobile phone roaming in detail?

            Not really, it’s superficially a close cousin of a lot of generic solutions to similar problems of the form “let’s treat the basic infrastructure kind of like a public good and the services provided over it as a competitive industry”. It’s the lesson that you’d learn from, for example, an MBA case study on the National Grid. As a matter of fact this is the wrong generic solution to the rural mobile phone problem, but in order to realise that, you’d have to either know about mobile phones yourself, or follow the proper process rather than going red mist, and chase up the views of someone who actually knew.


  2. ‘Tom Watson should be back in the shadow cabinet.’

    I wonder why he’s not in it. It might well be that he feels he can do a lot more good outside it- and if he does feel that, he might well be right. He’s looking to stir a lot of things up. His posts come up on my Facebook feed, and he’s digging as hard as he can into several different child abuse scandals, plus police corruption, plus surveillance, plus the UK’s use of drones, plus the USAF bases on UK soil, plus of course Murdoch…If he was back in the Shadow Cabinet, how many of these would he be ask questions on? And how many of the questions he’s currently asking would he have to tone down or simply not ask?

    I think- and it’s meant as the opposite of an insult- that Watson may well be one of those politicians who are most use on the backbenches.

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    1. On the other hand, Labour were doing better in the polls when he had tactical control of their campaign. (Better than what they were before they’ve been doing better than what they have been, to use a Yorkshireism.)

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  3. Dsquared: ‘The problem with the PPE degree is not so much that the people who take it aren’t bright – they generally are – as that it massively teaches you (by the way the course is set up) that if you are bright, you can pick up a bluffer’s modicum on more or less any subject in the course of a week, and that if you are plausible and articulate you can usually get away with it.’

    This is absolutely true.

    Not quite so sure about this: ‘If you’re not bright enough to pick things up quickly then PPE can be a hellish experience, but if you are then you quickly learn that the marginal reward for getting real expertise is small relative to the marginal cost…’

    One of the reasons I hated PPE, to the extent of changing my degree, was the sheer hellishness of being surrounded by other undergraduates who either don’t realise that you could go into subjects in somewhat more depth than that of the typical PPE essay, or who did realise but who thought you rather weird for ever wanting to do so.

    If you’re doing PPE, then you come to two (often utterly unrelated) new subjects every week and turn out an essay on them (plus, in your first year, a set of formal logic questions), and you do this eight times a term, three terms a year, in between whatever you’re doing extra-curriculum. As dsquared notes, this is great if you don’t want to get seriously interested in any subject but just pick up a smattering of knowledge on several dozen different subjects in a year. It’s bloody depressing if you thought that the purpose of going to Oxford was to act in any way as if some things are actually important enough to try to understand deeply.

    And I’m afraid that I think that as a result, the déformations professionnelles of successful PPEists are rather more various, and rather more serious, than Dsquared concedes.

    It’s not just bloody Cameron, and his drawbacks are not just limited to his temper. Both Milibands are PPEists, as are both halves of the Balls-Cooper marriage, as are- well, actually, looking among the superficial, smug, groupthinkers of the current Tory and Labour front-benchers, it sometimes seems harder to find those who didn’t study PPE than those who did.

    PPE breeds, among other things, an unearned feeling of superiority (granted, this is also a wider Oxbridge trait), and intellectual incuriosity. Perhaps more damagingly it gives young and unavoidably immature people an entry into a group of political obsessives who then leave Oxford to work for the slightly older political obsessives who run political parties, which caste they join themselves in pretty short order. There would be something like this process even without PPE, but God knows that the degree makes the narrowing of our political class a whole lot easier and a whole lot more severe.

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    1. I will confess that it had literally never occurred to me that someone might actually want to learn more about a subject than was immediately necessary in order to produce a weekly essay. It still seems to me to be one of those things like anal sex or Breaking Bad, which must surely have something to it because so many people think it’s great, but which I’ve never been remotely tempted to try myself.

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      1. (Replying to my own comment like the loon I am, I would actually, in the right place and time, defend the acquisition of a wide range of different, necessarily shallow, problem solving approaches and generic solutions as being in every way as valid a philosophy of education as the deep study of a smaller range of subjects, and am currently writing a book defending something of the sort as the only valid approach to economics. But that’s really for another time and blog post)

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  4. If you’re doing PPE, then you come to two (often utterly unrelated) new subjects every week and turn out an essay on them (plus, in your first year, a set of formal logic questions), and you do this eight times a term, three terms a year, in between whatever you’re doing extra-curriculum

    This is pretty much the experience of anyone doing an Oxford degree, though – the only difference being that most of us don’t do joint honours, so you only have to turn out one essay on a completely new topic every week. (For additional fun, try the experience of having your lab sessions and lectures get out of sync with your tutorials, so you’re doing 30-40 hours a week learning one subject and spending your evenings writing an essay on a completely different subject.)

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  5. THe staggeringly little amount of work I did in my Oxford degree is a source of genuine regret for me; not just in interviews when someone on the ball asks me why it took four years to do a BA.

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  6. Hmmm…. Replying to my own comment, like the loon I am, I find several reasons to disagree with myself. Firstly I don’t think it’s true that PPE necessarily encourages intellectual incuriosity: that, I think, was a comment rather strongly influenced by a few of the other people doing PPE in my year at my college. The PPEists in the year below had a number of people who were genuinely interested in their subjects and tried to read on them as deeply as possible. But there is still a problem with reading deeply on any subject when you’re going through two new topics a week.

    Dsquared: ‘ I would actually, in the right place and time, defend the acquisition of a wide range of different, necessarily shallow, problem solving approaches and generic solutions as being in every way as valid a philosophy of education as the deep study of a smaller range of subjects’.

    I’d certainly agree that this is one thing that any university should be teaching its students to do. But that is pretty much the only thing that PPE does teach: term after term, it’s a case of ‘eight weeks, eight topics’, and by God you’d better not make a habit of going into tutorials saying ‘I don’t think I got to grips with this in three days, there must be more that can be said’.

    Also, I’d disagree with Dsquared that PPE students acquire ‘a *wide* range of different, necessarily shallow, problem solving approaches and generic solutions’. The approaches don’t seem all that wide to me, and only a few papers really seem to be about problem solving, as opposed to giving an informed opinion.

    Most PPE students are doing eight papers that promote the same approach: read a number of papers, maybe skim some books, give a good summary of the chief prevailing views (solid 2:1), argue hard in favour of one prevailing view (chance of a First). A few students choose to do something more numerate by choosing a paper in econometrics or stats or economic theory, but few do.

    The problem is not with PPE students who find that they can get through 16 new topics every term, and then go on to learn other intellectual approaches throughout their career. It’s with the ones who come out of PPE and spend the rest of their lives thinking ‘I’ve had two days to read all the papers on the subject and now I understand it’. On some topics that might be enough to get a decent understanding, but on some it really won’t. All too many PPE graduates don’t seem to realise this. And some of them are running the country.

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    1. give a good summary of the chief prevailing views (solid 2:1), argue hard in favour of one prevailing view (chance of a First)

      Don’t they do “dispute the premises of the question”?

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  7. Don’t they do “dispute the premises of the question”?

    I think the tutors kind of got wise to that one, and presumably got sick of dealing with two hundred eighteen-year-old little squits, all questioning the foundations of knowledge every year.

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  8. It’s notable, that Oxford doesn’t expect graduate philosophy students from a PPE background to really know that much philosophy. To the extent that they have a slightly odd 2 year (B.Phil) postgraduate degree in which they really have to learn the subject.

    I’m not sure what Economics does? Insist on an M.Phil first?

    think the tutors kind of got wise to that one, and presumably got sick of dealing with two hundred eighteen-year-old little squits, all questioning the foundations of knowledge every year.

    I certainly found myself somewhat unfairly monstering the odd one or two, when I got rather tired of that approach.

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  9. Good post.

    We now have the interesting position where MPs who fight tooth and nail against sites being built in there constituencies 15 years ago are demanding that the Government pays for sites to be built by Arqiva through the MIP programme.

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