Two giants of the telecom industry, Vodafone and O2 parent company Telefonica UK, have announced on Thursday, June 7, plans to create a joint venture to share their network infrastructure, pledging to deliver next-generation 4G services to UK consumers twice as fast. The joint venture will take over the companies' basic network infrastructure, including their towers and 18,500+ masts.
According to Vodafone and O2, the deal is expected to go through later this year and should provide improved reception for customers of both companies. With their infrastructure combined, the two operators claimed that by 2015 the joint venture will deliver indoor 2G and 3G coverage for 98 percent of the UK population.
No Free Roaming
However, while a similar venture between Orange and T-Mobile allows free roaming between their networks, Vodafone and O2 will keep their customers separate, each carrying traffic on its respective network. "Our partnership is not about using each other's networks for customers to roam. This proposal is about consolidating existing network infrastructure and local transmission to create one national grid reaching more people quicker than is possible independently," an O2 spokeswoman told ZDNet UK.
"Both companies will run their independent spectrum on this grid. Customers will remain a customer of their chosen operator, and will only have access to that network signal and services. Vodafone customers will continue to connect to the O2 network," added the spokeswoman.
Ofcom's Proposed 4G Rollout
The joint venture between O2 and Vodafone comes as an effort towards the UK's proposed 4G rollout. According to the two companies, the new network-sharing agreement will enable them to meet Ofcom's requirement that 4G deployments should cover 98 percent of the population by 2017.
The UK phone industry is making efforts to adapt to current requirements, at a time when data from smartphones is loading their networks much more than traditional voice calls. At the press conference announcing the new agreement, Telefonica UK's Ronan Dunne mentioned a data tsunami which will only get bigger, as 50 percent of UK teenagers now own a smartphone.
For this reason, the faster 4G spectrum, which should offer far greater capacity, is essential for today's Britain, where increasingly more people will browse the Internet over mobile rather than fixed networks. According to Vodafone's Guy Lawrence, Vodafone and O2 will now be able to meet Ofcom's proposed rollout and deliver 4G coverage to 98 percent of the UK population two years earlier than required - by 2015 instead of 2017.
