Mobile Phones and accessories

The Mall Charter Walk Shopping Centre, Burnley

Our approach Everything we do is geared to delivering mobile how it’s meant to be - useful, easy and good value: We are building the world’s most advanced mobile network here in the UK, designed to carry data traffic. We agreed a network sharing agreement with T-Mobile in 2007, which gives us the ability to deliver our planned capacity for voice and data to 98 per cent of the UK population by 2009. Capacity upgrades, including to the backhaul (which carries the data from each site to the core processing centres), site rollout and other technical innovations are all geared to providing the capacity and coverage needed to offer the services that people want today and will want in increasing volumes tomorrow. We provide devices that are internet ready. This means building internet services into the handset - email, instant messenger, VoIP, social networking, maps and location. It also means providing products such as our USB Mobile Broadband modems ("dongles") to enable even simpler ways to connect to the internet when you are on the move. The 3 Skypephone is the first example of this and there is more to come. Levelling the regulatory playing field. Mobile regulation was designed for the first generation of mobile. It actually goes right back to the very early days of telecoms in the 19th century. Voice is charged on per minute usage, with text and data services charged at a premium based on a per-event tariff. The mobile internet lies idle under these conditions, especially as it has to compete against the flat-rate tariffs of the fixed internet world. Mobility is a huge advantage but it has to be allowed to provide good value and not be seen as too expensive to use. Removing regulated wholesale prices (Mobile Termination Rates, or MTRs),will make mobile number porting easy and will reduce expensive data roaming charges. Planning ahead for a fair spectrum allocation will enable the mobile internet for the long term. All of this needs to happen if we are to create an effective market for the future. Educating the market. We are focused on active consumer engagement and education through our retail stores and our marketing activities. We aim to help the regulator understand what can be done to help drive the future of mobile – what the mobile internet can and cannot do and how much it’s going to cost.

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