Three of four Europeans can’t access 4G/LTE in...

EU members Ireland, Cyprus and Malta have no 4G services at all, and only Germany, Estonia and Sweden have advanced 4G rollout, it said. The “EU is teetering on the edge of network collapse,” said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. With global mobile traffic predicted to grow by 66 percent a year, and more people wanting to watch video on their smart devices, more spectrum must be made available or “the whole thing falls apart,” she said. The EU isn’t to blame for the situation, the EC said. It has made huge amounts of spectrum available to meet the needs of high-speed wireless broadband, but spectrum is allocated at the national level, it said. National problems have caused procedural and licensing delays, while spectrum auctions have left mobile operators without the cash needed to roll out networks, it said. Combined with the fragmentation of 28 national markets, operators have no real chance to develop an EU-wide mobile strategy it said. The prices companies pay for spectrum can be 50 times higher in one EU country than in another, and on average, spectrum rights are nearly four times more expensive in the EU than in the U.S., it said. To alleviate the situation, the EC is consulting on better coordination of spectrum licensing to help operators take advantage of economies of scale which could come from deploying 4G in the same spectrum band in several nations at once and give consumers 4G access sooner, it said. The EC has also begun the preliminary phase of enforcement under Europe’s radio spectrum policy program to authorize EU-harmonised spectrum suitable for 4G (870 MHz), it said.