Versatile Amphibian

Following the thoughts on the 'green-ness' of telecoms companies, it struck me that the forthcoming auction of digital dividend spectrum in the UK is a great opportunity for the Government and Ofcom to stop tinkering round the edges of both the green agenda and Digital Britain and take some positive action. Auctioning the spectrum (suitable for LTE) to the highest bidder is a safe move, but it won't bring us any closer to either meeting the pledge to halve our carbon emissions by 2050, or the rather shorter term objective of giving everyone the option of connecting the Internet with reasonable bandwidth. Instead, I propose a scheme based on rewarding operators for being part of an industrial and social commons. The carrot in this scheme is free spectrum for cellular LTE use. The value of this is yet to be established, however we have many data points to choose from, for example: GSM licenses in the UK cost £142,560 per 2*200KHz slot per annum. This adds up to about £16m per...

I've been asked to contribute of a debate on 'green telecoms', specifically how the telecoms industry can enable other industries as they seek to reduce carbon emissions. A couple of thoughts I've had on the subject: First , should the telecoms industry contribute to the industrial commons by making certain data available to all, in the same way that GPS signals are open to anyone with a receiver? Tom Tom's HD Traffic service is one service that makes use of data on handset movement to route traffic. Could this data benefit everyone, reducing jams and hence emissions? Second , is there a benefit to a short range car-to-car communications system, a kind of automotive social networking that enables ECUs to communicate with each other? Besides the obvious benefits around collision avoidance, could such ad-hoc networking help manage traffic flow and even enable the sharing of services such as GPS routing and even in-car entertainment? Sounds interesting conceptually - ...