VodafoneThree’s network chief, Andrea Donà is calling for urgent planning reform to accelerate mobile infrastructure upgrades, warning that lengthy approval processes risk leaving the UK behind in the race to adopt AI.
VodafoneThree Chief Network Officer and Network Director, Donà says the company has £11 billion to invest in its network but needs government help to get that money working faster.
“It’s embarrassing because, as an industry, we haven’t been able to deliver what the UK economy, the public, the consumer, business needs, in terms of performance of national critical infrastructure, like mobile,” Donà tells Mobile Europe.
He said operators had struggled to invest quickly enough because of planning restrictions.
“We’ve been hampered in our investment. If you look at our situation today, we’ve got £11 billion to invest. I need government to help me through planning reform, to be able to spend that money in the most efficient, effective and fast way.”
Calls for simpler planning rules
One of Donà’s main concerns is the amount of planning required to make relatively small changes to existing mobile masts.
“Not everything should go through full planning. We should expand the permitted development rights,” he says.
“When I’ve got an existing mast and I need to expand it by two metres in height or half a metre in width, I need to do full planning. It should be permitted.”
He said operators also need to be able to decide where network upgrades are most urgently needed, rather than being pushed towards less suitable locations.
“Effective because I know what I need to upgrade. Please allow me to upgrade what I know I need to to do. Don’t divert me to say, ‘Why didn’t you upgrade this side as opposed to that?’ That’s suboptimal. That will not deliver the correct effective solution. It’ll be suboptimal,” he continues.
“Then it won’t be efficient because I will have to spend twice rather than spending it in the right place for the right reason and let me do it fast, because the planning approval process is quite long.”
Donà also pointed to problems when mobile equipment must be removed from buildings that are being redeveloped.
“We get quite a lot of notices to quit. We get forced off buildings in London, in major city centres, because they’re developing. We don’t want to stop that. But the notice we get to come off is shorter than the time it takes to rebuild it.”
According to Doná, he typically gets 18 months’ notice, but it takes 32 to 36 months to get telecoms infrastructure in place, leaving a significant gap.
The aim, he says, is not to install telecoms infrastructure everywhere, but to remove the need for additional permissions if it is needed later.
He notes: “Just by default, grant redevelopment rights on the basis that, should we need to have a telecom solution there, you can have it.”
Why AI needs a better network
Donà also sees the issue as bigger than mobile coverage.
He believes the UK’s AI ambitions will depend on having the network infrastructure to move huge amounts of data between users and data centres.
Doná says that, just as a motorway needs enough capacity to keep traffic moving, AI needs a fast and responsive connection between users and the data centres powering it.
Without that capacity, he argues, the user experience will suffer, he explains.
Meanwhile, he adds 5G standalone (5GSA) could help by providing faster responses and more capacity.
The company is already putting some of these capabilities into practice. Vodafone Business has launched SuperMobile for Business, using a dedicated 5G+ network slice to provide businesses with reserved network capacity and more consistent performance.
The service is designed to give businesses faster, more reliable connectivity for critical applications, especially in busy locations where networks can become congested.
The launch highlights the growing need for network capacity that can keep up as businesses increasingly rely on AI and other data-heavy technologies.
“Due of the frequencies we have and the capacity we’re putting in, and because it’s a 5G standalone network, the latency and response to any instruction sent to the network are fast. That gives you a good AI experience,” he notes.
“You don’t want to be interrogating AI and waiting for a response to arrive,” he says.
“If you don’t have the motorway built for that level of traffic exchange between the data centres and the end users, you could very quickly end up with congestion, and then we’ll fall behind.”
“To not fall behind in the AI race, you need the data centres that do the calculations, the inferencing and all the processing of the data. But you also need the motorway and the pipes to transfer that data.”
He continues: “That’s where we need to be careful to make sure the UK doesn’t fall behind.”
‘The UK deserves to be number one in telecoms’
For Donà, the issue comes down to whether the UK has the infrastructure to match its economic ambitions.
“The UK deserves to be number one in telecoms. It’s a first-world country, it’s got a very developed economy, and the government has a growth ambition,” he continues.
“It should have an infrastructure that’s worthy of the ambition that the government has. If the UK wants to lead the world in terms of AI adoption, in terms of digital adoption. It needs the infrastructure to do so.”
“Not having the infrastructure is the embarrassing bit,” he adds.
Donà said VodafoneThree now has the money to invest following the combination of Vodafone and Three but needs a clearer route to getting that investment deployed.
“Now we have the investment. For the first time ever, I have the investment. I’m not asking anyone for the money. We brought the two companies together as neighbours to create synergies that allow us to invest in the network.”
“Now I need the opportunity, or the clear route, to spend it fast so I can build what I need to build,” he concludes.
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