Competition and Regulatory Counsel role at Vodafone in the UK

Slightly cheeky, but, just in case it is of interest to anyone on the course (or anyone you might know), Vodafone has a vacancy for a competition and communications regulatory counsel, supporting its UK operating company.

Based in Newbury, it is an excellent role with a wide range of challenging issues, including strategic commercial transactions, competition compliance, telecoms regulation and regulatory litigation. The major downside is that you'd have to put up with working with me...

You can find more details here if you are interested.

Parkinson's Law

One of the classic organisational book in the United Kingdom is ‘Parkinson’s Law. It was first published in 1955 and in matters of detail is somewhat dated. Its key precepts rain valid and I would certainly commend the book as an entertaining and educative read. On law states that organisations reach the peak of their physical state at the point when terminal decline has already set in.

This weekend there has been quite a bit of publicity in the United Kingdom about the future (or lack of) for public  telephone call boxes. BT have argued that athird of their call boxes generate less than £1 in revenue each month 

How does Parkinson’s Law apply to this? In 1998 around 25% of the UK’s population had a mobile phone. By February 2002, this had risen to 75%. Mobile phones, of course, make call boxes effectively redundant except in areas where there is no mobile phone reception. What else happened in 2002? You’ve guessed it. The number of call boxes reached its highest ever level.

Parkinson strikes again!

A single market for communications in Europe

The notion of a single market for communications in Europe is not a new one, but Neelie Kroes caused to be mull over the idea with a tweet she made a couple of days ago:

History is perhaps not on Kroes' side here, with communications networks arising in an inherently national manner, with interconnections being made to enable cross-network, and intra-country, communications, but perhaps, given the idea of a single European market, communications should be offered on a truly pan-European basis.

I am not sure how certain parties would feel about this, though — would local regulators want to be effectively franchises of a centralised regulatory agency? Would local security services and national security functions welcome the idea that other agencies may have better access to communications data and content about "their" citizens than they do?

Or would the economies of scale which could be made from such an approach outweigh the benefits — one centralised infrastructure, across dual sites perhaps for resiliency, but without a need to maintain a core network in each market in which the service is offered.

Could this also be a way for network operators to compete with over the top communications service providers, which are already pan-European, even pan-global, in nature?