My Lords, my Amendment 17 is along similar lines. Perhaps because of my comments at Second Reading, I have had various meetings with mobile phone operators. They take me to task for contrasting their performance with my experience of broadcasting where for 50 years ITV and the BBC have been sharing masts. They correctly point out that broadcasters can differentiate their product by content, whereas they cannot. Their business model is based entirely on one provider owning one mast and providing that signal to its subscribers alone. In fairness, it is not the ideal way to build infrastructure. For water, the equivalent would be three water mains running into the average house and three sewage pipes taking waste away. It is a pretty silly way to organise things, but it is the way they have been organised and—as everyone says nowadays with a degree of resignation about quite a lot of subjects—we are where we are.
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I accept that no roaming is the rule of the game normally, but I agree with my noble friend Lord Stevenson. What happens when the market just stops and cannot deliver? Recently, Ofcom produced an app which I recommend to all noble Lords. It is free, and will tell you what signal you are getting on your premises and your broadband speed et cetera, as well as showing you which providers offer the best signal. It is going to arm the average citizen with the information to challenge their providers and say, “Look, you are meant to be giving 4G by the end of December 2017. At the moment you cannot even give me 3G. What are you going to do about it?”. The Bill at the moment simply requires a communications provider to provide compensation. That is important, and compensation matters, but it does not actually help deliver the 4G or whatever that the end-user is looking for.
My amendment suggests that once the current system has been shown to fail, we should allow roaming. My noble friend Lord Stevenson used the term
national roaming, which we use to distinguish it from roaming when you are abroad, which is most people’s experience of roaming. The fact is that anybody who comes from Europe to this country can roam and find the best signal. We are simply saying that in certain circumstances, when an adequate signal cannot be provided by the mobile provider, the end-user should be allowed to roam.
Beyond that, I would like to see the development of joint masts and would not rule out the possibility, I am afraid, of subsidy. If at the end of the day we are prepared to subsidise the provision of fibre, we should also be prepared to subsidise if necessary in very remote areas the sort of masts that will host 5G, because that will be the way that a lot of people get broadband.