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Special Feature - O2-UK and Vodafone in the Scottish Highlands

That said, there are many reasons for the mobile networks to wish to cover the Highlands. There are a large number of industries in the area that can benefit from mobile usage, such as forestry, fishing, farming, oil, to name just a few. Then there are the tourists... who when they visit on holidays hope/assume they can make and receive calls just like in their home area. Whether using a phone for personal or business reasons, when driving along remote stretches of road the knowledge that one can make an emergency call should the need arise is particularly comforting. Finally the intense competition between the four UK networks is such that tactically they can benefit by being the first to offer service in a particular area. Get there first and hopefully sign up the local business before the competition comes along! And the amount of UK coverage that each network says it can offer remains a major selling point. The Highlands make an unsightly blank part of a networks published UK coverage map.

There are a couple of factors that make it easier for the mobile networks. Firstly there are a significant number of existing masts in the Highlands - in particular TV & FM relay stations, and masts for the utilities (water, electricity etc), and the emergency services. All of these organisations require fixed or mobile radio coverage in the area and offer possibilities for site-sharing. 

Secondly, most of the population within reasonable distance of an A or B class road. Thus by installing transmitters a) along these 'arteries' as well as b) on the existing broadcast relay masts covering pockets of population, they can cover the majority of populated areas. Using these two kinds of sites they are most likely as well to have relatively easy site access, and hopefully easier connection to mains electricity for the transmission equipment.

Given the above, although some installs can be on masts shared with other services (as at Fort Augustus, right), it is clear that there is a need to put up new masts, particularly at points along roads where there are not existing masts in suitable locations that can be shared. Installing new base stations on hilltop sites is not going to be cheap, given that each requires for instance: mains power, network link, site access rights, weather protection, purchase or lease of land, installation and maintenance charges as well as the cost of transmission equipment, cabin and mast itself.

Because of the much higher costs involved, as detailed above, per head of population covered by each new site, when compared with say, an installation in London, O2-UK and Vodafone have, in an unique initiative, teamed up to provide coverage in the Highlands. Working together will greatly reduce the costs to each of the networks compared to development alone.

In addition, there are environmental benefits. Using single installs for both networks will reduce the number of total sites, compared to the networks installing seperately, so O2-UK and Vodafone can justly claim brownie points for environmental awareness, in an area of exceptional natural beauty, whilst being able to offer their customers enhanced coverage, and (hopefully) make some extra money from the venture.

To ensure the most discrete and cost-effective install, it is necessary to integrate as much as possible the equipment for each of the two networks at each transmission site. Vodafone and O2-UK have thus worked together to develop a new fully shared base station for the very purpose of providing coverage in the Scottish Highlands (see photo left).

The base stations consists of a single green coloured equipment cabin and khaki-coloured mast with four omni-directional antennae supplying both Vodafone and O2-UK GSM coverage (presumably two antennae for each network).The whole install is mounted on a concrete base and enclosed within a wooden fence. 

The colour of the mast, equipment hut and the wooden fencing have clearly been designed to make the base station as inconspicuous as possible. There is a microwave dish to link into the networks infrastructure. There's also on the equipment cabin a security light with infra-red detection and a mains input or output (possibly for a backup generator supply?).

Financially, O2-UK and Vodafone are investing £36m in the Highlands project, with an additional £4m of funding awarded by the European Objective 1 programme. The scheme should be completed by the year 2000, with 95% of the Scottish Highlands population covered, and 90% coverage along A & B roads in the region. The project should be 75% complete by Spring 1999.

O2-UK in a recent press release have given more details about plans for coverage across the country of Scotland as a whole. Currently coverage is at 95% Scottish population (compared to 98% UK population) and 100% of Scottish motorways. The population coverage figure will increase to 98% by Spring 1999. A new switching centre is being installed in Glasgow to maintain the new capacity and increase in sites. No doubt Vodafone is undertaking similar plans if it hasn't already done so.

As far as the Highlands go, from visiting the area in Summer 1998, the initial rollout of the new base stations appears to be along the A82 Glasgow to Fort William, A87 Fort William - Kyle, A83 Loch Fyne, A85 Loch Etive, amongst other places.

It's worth noting at this point that mobile phone usage in the Scottish Highlands is not new, both O2-UK and Vodafone already over the years have installed a significant number of GSM sites covering, in general, the population centres (places such as Inverness, Fort William, Oban, A9 route and many others) & commercial areas such as the Shetlands (oil industry), Vodafone have also had analogue (TACS) sites along the more remote North West coastline for some time.

However this project will provide consistence to coverage in the Highlands, making it more 'continuous' rather than 'patchy'. Up until now there's been no particular rule of thumb as to whether an area within the Highlands is covered, or is not.

Those PCN (GSM-1800) people out there will say... but you haven't made any mention of Orange or T-Mobile! The situation is that both Orange and T-Mobile also plan to provide coverage across the Highlands. You can check out planned coverage for Orange on their website, and for T-Mobile by having a look in a dealership at one of their new coverage maps. 

It looks like O2-UK and Vodafone will just get there first with the others not far behind! There's no doubt that technically the GSM-900 system as used by Vodafone and O2-UK will be more suited to covering such terrain, but more choice can only be a good thing. I just hope that Orange and T-Mobile will also have some kind of a site sharing scheme. Not surprisingly it doesn't look like the shared O2-UK and Vodafone base station will accomodate equipment for the GSM-1800 networks (though I could be wrong!)

The very worst case would be each area having an Orange mast/pole, T-Mobile mast/pole as well as the O2-UK/Vodafone mast. From an environmental point of view this would be a disaster. It would be nice to avoid in the Highlands the multi-masting (*) seen across much of the rest of the UK. I just hope the operators involved (or the planning authorities) have the sense not to allow this to happen in the Highlands area.

Update: 2005 - in fact Orange/T-Mobile have teamed up in some areas to put up a shared site similar to the Vodafone/O2 one. In others they have done their own thing.

(*) Multi-masting - multiple masts installed by competing operators on nearby sites to cover a single or similar coverage area. (my term!)
 
 

Written by Mike Pratt - Saturday 11th July 1998. Every effort is made to ensure accuracy of this material. However given that this was written without input from the operators concerned, I cannot guarantee its absolute accuracy.
 

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