A few weeks ago I attended a mobile broadband event for journalists and analysts hosted by UK operator 3, which aimed to dispel “confusion about mobile broadband”.
The confusion in question concerned rival mobile operator Vodafone, which was the subject of an official complaint that 3 made to the Advertising Standards Authority in early May. At issue was an advert for Vodafone’s mobile broadband service.

What had annoyed 3 was Vodafone’s claim that its service supported a speed of 7.2Mbit/s, which 3 said was a theoretical line speed and not one that any mobile user would ever be able to see. This kind of dispute is not unique to the mobile communications sector, of course. Television advertising breaks are riddled with all kinds of performance claims for various products and services that rarely stand up to rigorous and objective scrutiny.

So where did the 7.2Mbit/s figure come from? Well, it’s the theoretical download speed available from Vodafone’s High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) service. The carrier started upgrading its mobile network infrastructure with this in late 2007, and I had a look at one of its dinky USB dongles that support the service earlier this year. After plugging the dongle into my laptop and spending five minutes setting up the software, I found the service offered about 2Mbit/s in central London, dropping back to 800Kbit/s in sunny Tottenham.

Meanwhile, 3 is upgrading its mobile infrastructure, and in July will launch its own HSUPA service. I can’t help wondering whether, had 3 been first out of the traps in the HSUPA stakes, its advertising gurus would have resisted the temptation to shout “7.2Mbit/s” from the rooftops.

Looking beyond the issue of raw bandwidth, what about coverage? Well, what differentiates 3’s service, according to the operator, is its coverage density, which stands at about 92 per cent of the UK population. Its agreement with German mobile operator T-Mobile to share infrastructure is expected to push this up to about 98 per cent by early 2009, but we are talking High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) here, not HSUPA. The coverage density of Vodafone’s HSUPA service will not, I suspect, approach that ­ unless, of course, it teams up with another rival network operator.

Is sharing mobile infrastructure the way to go? If it leads to better coverage for customers, then I would say yes. This was the subject of a recent House of Commons debate. The Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells and shadow cabinet office minister Greg Clark proposed a bill to make provision for the sharing of transmission masts. Clark covered a lot of ground in the debate, from getting better reception, to the need to have fewer phone masts, through to making the whole system a lot more robust.

But here’s the annoying part for the customer: if you complain about the lack of high-speed coverage in your area, nothing seems to happen. Yet when an MP has a grievance, the result is a draft bill that proposes to force mobile operators to share infrastructure and give a better service.

The irony is that it was politicians who created this situation when the government decided to allocate 3G spectrum licences by auctioning them to the highest bidder back in 2000. This led to the carriers paying such hugely inflated prices for the right to operate a high-speed network that they have struggled to summon up the necessary resources to actually deliver such a service ever since.

It seems that parliament now wants to fix this situation, and if it means forcing recalcitrant mobile operators to work together and share some infrastructure, then so be it, I say.