What a week it’s been for mobility! Following a story we covered in November, the government has now signed a landmark deal with the UK’s top mobile phone carriers to improve coverage across the country. EE, O2, 3 and Vodafone will make a £5bn investment to improve infrastructure – Each provider guaranteeing voice and text coverage across 90% of the UK by 2017.
On the topic of Connected Britain, it seems our digital economy is booming outside of London, with 74% of digital firms now based beyond the capital. Bournemouth, Liverpool and Brighton emerging as the industry’s runaway success stories in the Tech Nation report.
Here’s some more of my top mobility picks this week:
- A new survey by Strategy Analytics has revealed that mobile workers now make up almost a third of the workforce across the US, UK, France and Germany.
- British chip designer Arm Holdings has announced a next generation mobile processor that is tipped to make next year’s smartphones 50 times more powerful than those from five years ago – watch this space!
- Three will deploy 800MHz spectrum, VoLTE and small cells in a bid to be the UK’s most reliable network, confident that reliability is more important to subscribers than speed.
- A poll of business travellers has identified London as one of the worst cities for free WiFi. New York topped the chart, with Singapore, Bangalore and Barcelona following. The UK, meanwhile, lagged at no17, capturing just 1% of the vote.
- Samsung has collaborated with Good Technology to create Good for Samsung Knox, which aims to make it easier for businesses to use Android devices securely. The platform also uses Cisco AnyConnect VPN [which is nice] and will secure devices from the hardware level through to the application.
It would be remiss of me not to mention a piece of our own research – The Cisco Visual Networking Index predicts that mobile data traffic will increase nearly tenfold between 2014 and 2019 to reach 24.3 exabytes per month by 2019.
That’s your lot for this week! I’d love to hear what you think about this week’s mobility news – does free WiFi in London leave you in the cold? Perhaps your business should relocate to Bournemouth? Share you views with me by leaving a comment below or tweeting @GrahamFranklin or @CiscoUKI.
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