End in sight for spectrum refarming debate

Oh to be a fly on the wall... Lord Carter, of Digital Britain fame, has summoned all the mobile operators to a series of meetings, to be chaired by Broadband Stakeholder Group chief Kip Meek. The first of the meetings is scheduled for tomorrow.

The purpose of the negotiations is to sort out the spectrum refarming issue, which is highly complicated and very, very silly - for the details, I'll direct you to the last time I wrote about it. In effect, the issue is holding up the 2.6GHz spectrum auction that was supposed to have taken place last year, but didn't, and Carter sees the auction as crucial to solving the wireless component of universal 2Gbps broadband access. He's right, too, as we're extremely unlikely to see LTE (aka 4G) or mobile WiMax (also, possibly, 4G) in the UK without it.

Anyway, we wish him luck in bashing heads together, and hope a sensible resolution can be achieved. The faster, the better. So to speak.