How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

People want more space, so houses are

in and flats are out

The housing market

Flatlining

Peaked?

Space race

Britain, house prices

% change on a year earlier, August 2020

Source: Zoopla

Five bedroom

Four bedroom

Three bedroom

Two bedroom

Three bedroom

Two bedroom

One bedroom

3

2

1

0

-1

-2

Flat

House

---

The Economist

September 5th 2020 

Britain

23

2

the land matters too. Hills and trees inter-

fere with mobile signals. A second reason

is planning. Other European countries

have more liberal planning laws, says Ka-

ren Egan, a telecoms analyst with Enders

Analysis, a research firm. Councils present

one obstacle. The farmers on whose land

towers need to go present another.

The way in which spectrum is allocated

also affects the quality of the service. Just as

more water flows through a broader pipe,

the more spectrum an operator has, the

better the service it can provide. Many

countries have just three networks. Britain

has four. That means more competition

and lower prices, but also less spectrum for

each. Moreover, only half of the 5

g

spec-

trum has so far been auctioned. When the

next chunk is bought up, networks may

find themselves with fragmented bits of

spectrum. Ms Egan describes the operators’

spectrum as “barcode-like: rather slim sliv-

ers of it, rather than large bands”.

That might be fixable. Ofcom, the tele-

coms regulator, is open to facilitating

swaps between networks, says Greig Paul, a

networks expert at the University of Strath-

clyde. But new problems have arisen, such

as the government’s decision to ban equip-

ment manufactured by Huawei, a Chinese

company, from 5

g

networks. That will slow

its roll-out and increase its cost. Conspira-

cy theories linking 5

g

to covid-19 and other

ailments do not help either.

This matters—not just for consumers

but also for industrial and agricultural

uses. The real promise of 5

g

is in vastly in-

creased capacity. The new network can

handle up to 1m connections per square ki-

lometre, compared with some 2,000 for 4

g

.

That is why much of the hype surrounding

5

g

has been about filling factories full of

sensors or connecting cows to the internet.

But uncertain rules slow progress and raise

costs. As Mr Paul puts it, “you cannot possi-

bly charge £10 per cow” per month. Opera-

tors will have to find a way to spend on in-

frastructure, control prices and greatly

increase the number of connections all at

the same time if they are to milk 5

g

.

7