Speech given by Natalie Black CBE, Ofcom’s Group Director for Networks and Communications, to the techUK Future Telecoms Conference, 6 February 2025, London.
Good afternoon.
Thank you for the invitation to speak to you all today. It is great to be back at techUK in my new role leading networks and communications at Ofcom. I have had the pleasure of working with techUK for over ten years now and most recently as the UK’s first Trade Commissioner to Asia Pacific where we set-up the UK-APAC Tech Forum which brought investors to the UK and helped UK tech companies grow in the region.
My time living in Asia has certainly raised my expectations of what we should expect from our communications networks. When you have done a Teams call in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago and dealt with all your emails on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka – you won’t be surprised that I come to this new role asking how can we work together to make sure the UK has the best connectivity in the world.
Now back in the UK, it’s fitting that we’re in the City of London today as I talk to you about regulating for growth, surrounded as we are by bastions of protection and behemoths of capitalism.
On one side of us is The Old Bailey. On the other, The Royal Courts of Justice. Both dedicated to safeguarding our security. And on their doorsteps, in the beating heart of our busy capital, are some of the biggest investment banks in the world.
Being sandwiched between the seemingly opposing ideologies of protection and growth is a familiar place for Ofcom to find itself. But that’s not actually how we see it. Both of these things are integrated into everything we do, rather than being separate standalone exercises.
Just as evidence is weighed and balanced on the scales of justice to achieve a fair and impartial decision, so too is protection and growth when it comes to ensuring the right outcomes for telecoms customers today and in the future.
We’ve seen growth in what consumers and businesses expect from their networks – from the football fan sitting on a train streaming the big match live, to the business owner sitting next to them on a video call.
In the last decade, the amount of broadband data an average household uses has grown tenfold – from around 50 gigabytes a month to more than 500 gigabytes. And we’ve seen growth in mobile data use too, despite the proliferation of WIFI.
Networks need to match this demand. But that requires long-term planning and investment. Growth doesn’t happen overnight. It can happen on its own, but it’s more likely to happen with a bit of encouragement.
So, what’s Ofcom doing to unlock opportunities, encourage investment, and open doors for innovation? How are we regulating for network growth? Well, I’d like to take you through three things we’re up to.
Growth in broadband
First, broadband. The UK wasn’t one of the first movers in the widespread roll-out of full fibre. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, South Korea – all have had more than 90% coverage for a while. And living in Asia before I took this role, I saw the difference having a good internet connection can make to communities.
On Indonesia’s seventeen and a half thousand islands, it means education; it means jobs; it means staying in touch with family; it means remittances in real time.
But we’ve been catching up fast, and in the last six years, broadband has been a UK growth success story. In fact, the UK has the fastest roll-out rate of full fibre in Europe.
In 2019, only 7% of British homes and offices could access ultrafast, future-proof, full-fibre broadband. Fast-forward to today, and that’s now 75%. Together, we made that happen. Ofcom opened the door, and industry stepped up to the challenge.
We’ve seen the fruits of that long-term planning I mentioned – which all started with our Digital Communications Review a decade ago. Since then, we’ve been honing our market reviews to create the conditions for competitive network investment.
We were the first country in Europe to review – in its own right – the market covering the underground tunnels and telegraph poles that carry the fibre cables. That significantly improved access to Openreach’s ducts and poles, for rivals laying their own lines, halving the capital cost for some new entrants.
Then, after years of traditional, cost-based regulation and falling prices, we transformed our approach to incentivising investment. We gave Openreach a margin. That gave its competitors a margin. And they didn’t need much help finding their way through that open door.
Competing networks started building like fury to try and gain that coveted first-mover advantage. That in turn spurred the newly-independent Openreach into action, and the rest – as they say – is history.
That competition is driving innovation, too – including new techniques for splicing fibre; new datalink standards; and state-of-the-art monitoring systems that mean faults can be fixed before customers even see them.
But that’s only half the innovation story. Faster, more reliable connections can unlock benefits for consumers and businesses that they hadn’t considered before.
I mentioned earlier that the average UK household uses more than 500 gigabytes of broadband data every month. Well, among households that have full fibre, that average usage goes up by 50%, to more than 750 gigabytes a month.
Our switching reforms have clearly injected some renewed vigour into the mix, too, with Vodafone reporting this week that its broadband customer base grew by a record amount last quarter, supported by the launch of One Touch Switch last year.
But the job’s not finished. There are still millions of households without full fibre. Encouragingly, if all network deployments are realised as planned, 96% of properties could have full fibre by 2027.
In our review covering 2021 to 2026, we recognised long-term investments such as this need regulatory certainty and stability, and we said we didn’t expect to introduce cost-based prices for fibre services until at least 2031.
This is our starting point for the next five-year leg of this journey, on which we’ll be consulting next month.
And we’ll continue to balance the scales by protecting customers during this period of transition and transformation. This is not growth at all costs. Yes, people want faster networks. But they also want secure, affordable networks, and they want to be moved across safely from the old to the new.
This is a hard line in the sand for us, and we won’t accept growth leading to consumer harm.
At this point, I want to acknowledge the hard work of everyone in the telecoms sector during the recent storms, to try and reduce disruption to people’s phone and broadband services, with efforts to reconnect customers still ongoing in some areas.
Growth in mobile
So I’ve talked about what’s happening with the broadband cables beneath our feet and in our homes. Now, switching to mobile – despite the remote working revolution, we’ve seen growth in demand for data on the move.
There’s no denying that competition in the UK mobile market is fierce. Our data shows that average prices were 5% lower in real terms in 2024 than in 2023, and 23% lower than in 2019 – despite average data use trebling over this period. People are getting more for less.
This follows a period of consumer policy interventions by Ofcom to make it as easy as possible for people to navigate the market and take advantage of the great offers that are available. For example, introducing switching reforms and end-of-contract notifications, and banning the sale of locked handsets.
But we think network quality is of growing importance to customers. We all know how frustrating it is when you can’t get signal. I can call my family and send them photos standing on an iceberg in Iceland, but I can’t get a connection when I’m standing outside my tube station on the way to work. Although mobile coverage is available across most of the UK, in many places it’s unreliable or patchy, which limits what people can do.
As the sector expert, we’ve been supporting the CMA in its review of the Vodafone/Three merger, which has resulted in a commitment from the companies to significantly improve investment in the reliability, capacity and performance of their network.
While the merger is yet to clear some formal hurdles, we think this network commitment would lead to sustained improvement across the industry.
We’re also looking at what more we can do to help consumers understand what mobile coverage is like in their area. We’re currently overhauling our mobile coverage web-checker, so people have better information about the actual experience they can expect and choose the network which is best for them.
However, as with broadband, there are things we can learn from Asia when it comes to improving mobile network quality, particularly in places where people need it most. For example, I was struck by how good the WIFI was on the Japanese bullet train.
Unfortunately, the only similarity with the UK was the station being plastered with One Direction posters. Rail connectivity is definitely a nut we haven’t cracked in this country yet. Something for all of us here to work together on, with Government and the rail companies.
But either way, we must not underestimate the importance of ensuring the security and resilience of both our fixed and mobile networks. Telecoms networks are an essential part of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure, as well as underpinning many parts of our economy. The threats faced by the sector – whether from cyber-attacks, extreme weather or aging equipment – are more significant than ever.
The Telecoms Security Act is clear about network obligations. This in turn provides a sound foundation to ensure that growth can be healthily maintained. The code of practice is world-leading and includes concepts specifically designed to enable an operator to avoid a wide range of threats, rather than just mitigating the impacts.
Growth in spectrum and space
Onto my final frontier of growth – spectrum. Supporting innovation is central to spectrum management – we consciously look to allocate spectrum to new use cases even when the commercial case is not yet clear. If you stick around, you’ll hear from one of our brilliant Spectrum Directors, Christina Data, a little later.
In recent years, Ofcom has run several awards of spectrum to support mobile broadband growth and has long worked with industries such as maritime, aviation, aerospace, emergency services and defence.
We’ve supported innovation in these areas, for example collaborating with the Civil Aviation Authority to support new commercial uses for drones, and also by enabling additional resilience for positioning, navigation and timing solutions for secure tracking, an alternative to GPS.
We’ve opened up opportunities, ahead of Europe, for new private mobile networks to support the digital transformation of sectors as varied as mining, logistics, and ports. And we’re opening up new opportunities for high-capacity solutions for private networks by making available high-frequency millimetre-wave spectrum.
We’ll continue to support the mobile industry in the deployment of advanced 5G, and 6G. Just this week, we’ve consulted on auctioning more spectrum for 4G and 5G mobile use. We also announced we’re releasing more spectrum for satellite use, and we approved a satellite licence for Amazon.
The space industry has never seen growth like today. Record numbers of satellites are in low orbit above the UK, changing how we live and connect.
It’s no wonder this is one of our busiest areas of work at the moment, which is no doubt keeping your teams busy, and it has huge potential for innovation and growth across the economy.
Over the next few years, we’ll be rapidly expanding spectrum allocations for space and satellite technology. We’ll be making spectrum available to significantly increase the capacity to offer satellite broadband services to people and businesses, particularly in remote areas. And we’ll be developing spectrum licences to support UK Space Launch capabilities.
Last week, we saw a significant development where the mobile and satellite markets converged. Vodafone successfully made the world’s first satellite video call using a standard mobile phone, up a mountain in west Wales where there was no coverage.
This was made possible by Ofcom issuing an innovation and trial licence.
Astronaut Tim Peake was on the other end of the call and reassured us all that there’s “plenty of room” in space for more satellites.
Conclusion
Hopefully that’s given you a taste of what we’re up to in broadband, mobile and spectrum.
From the ground beneath your feet, to the phone in your pocket, to the satellites that circle the Earth, we want to be a regulator that backs growth and supports the new networks that keep Britain connected, while protecting consumers.
So... Growth. Investment. Innovation. Protection. Transparency. Fairness. These things are not mutually exclusive. They can – and must – coexist alongside one another, like the great City of London institutions we’re surrounded by today.
We’ll play our part in keeping an eye on those scales, balancing them up if they tip too far one way or the other.
If we continue to work together to achieve these common goals, everyone stands to benefit.
Thank you.