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CTO Brendan O’Reilly contrasts the U.K.’s approach to network planning with South Korea’s.
O2 UK CTO Brendan O’Reilly this week shared some of the lessons the U.K. could learn from South Korea when it comes to rolling out mobile networks.
In a presentation at Connected Britain in London on Thursday, he echoed calls for planning rules to be streamlined and for widespread dark fibre access in order to speed up network deployment.
The need for change is particularly pressing in London, O’Reilly said, where he claimed the process of deploying a new mast can take three years from start to finish.
In London, "90% of all planning applications for a new mast get rejected," he added.
By comparison, on a recent trip to Seoul, he was informed by one operator that three months is considered a long time to roll out a new mast.
"They don’t have network planners in South Korea," he said, explaining that instead an operator sees where its rival has deployed a new site and simply copies it.
In the U.K., "planning laws are wildly out of date," he said.
There is some light a the end of the tunnel, though. The U.K. government aims to update the planning process by overhauling the electronic communications code as part of the Digital Economy Bill. Meanwhile, Ofcom has also ordered incumbent BT to provide dark fibre access from October 2017.
And the Korean approach is not perfect either, O’Reilly conceded.
"Seoul is the smartest city in the world; it is not a beautiful city. You can see the antennas," he said, adding that U.K. politicians who have travelled to Seoul want the functionality, "but they don’t want it to look like that."
O’Reilly said it is up to telcos and the U.K.’s central and local government to work together to deliver "invisible" infrastructure that addresses future demand for capacity.
"Collaboration sits absolutely at the heart of what we have to do," he said. "This isn’t a problem that we face in isolation, it’s a problem we face as U.K. plc."
While it is important that industry stakeholders work together in this area, there is also a vital role for the general public, O’Reilly said, sharing an anecdote about a situation in Wales in which planners repeatedly rejected applications for a new phone mast on the grounds that "it doesn’t look great" until local residents pointed out that they really needed the connectivity.
It’s not as simple as mobile operators standing up and saying "please help me," he explained. "You need the voice of the people on your side."
Additional reporting by Mary Lennighan
