Spectrum. Mention the word and most peoples eyes (and sometimes mine) glaze over. However, when you tell them just how much the ‘thin air’ around us is worth, they tend to open again. In 2003, the Government sold the spectrum used to operate Mobile 3G networks to operators for £22bn. Never mind that the mobile industry was almost bankrupted in the process, and that no-one is likely to pay anywhere near that much again. This is big money. The Treasury, through Ofcom, has taken notice ever since.

In today’s world of yawning budget deficits and scrambling efforts to bridge the divide, spectrum is seen as prime candidate for raising revenue. The Ministry of Defence, whose budget is of course particularly tight at the moment, jumped on the bandwagon earlier than most. Since the end of 2008, they have been busily setting out their wares. And what wares they are. MoD currently ‘owns’ 35% of all spectrum below 15 GHz, a lot which is usable for commercial operations. Commercial users haven’t previously had access to it or been able to pay for rights to use it. Since the 2005 Cave Review, plans have been in the works for it to lease large parts of its current holdings to commercial users and keep all the proceeds. Except when it actually needs to use it in times of national crisis. Then, all bets are off.

All of this has taken up much time at Intellect recently. Renting spectrum is much like renting land in many ways. The landlord needs to be good at sharing information with current and prospective tenants and be able act as a conduit for it. They need to have the ability to actively manage the land they own so that the tenant can use it effectively and, finally, they need to be able to put in place measures to stop trespassers from interfering with what the land is being used. Like land, a given piece of spectrum should ideally have one user. Its possible to share, but it gets a whole lot more complicated when you do. All of this requires resources. If Intellect members are going to rent spectrum from the MoD, they need to have the confidence that MoD can effectively manage and place a value on the spectrum that it owns. In much the same way that Ofcom currently does.

Intellect takes its role as the spectrum ‘tenants’ guardian seriously. A number of members have substantial interests in how it is allocated and used. After all, most of them manufacture devices that need access to spectrum to operate. There is a role for industry in educating the MoD on how to value its spectrum, and how to lease it in a way that actually maximises the potential uses that commercial users can make of it, thereby determining how much they will be willing to pay. Our position paper, MoD Spectrum Divestment: The Intellect Perspective, lays out how we believe MoD can optimise its release process to ensure that the UK gains maximum economic and societal benefit from what is an unprecedent release of spectrum on to the market, and how will we continue to work with them to enable maximum benefits for UK plc to be realised. Our continuing engagement with MoD on these issues is being handled by the Intellect Wireless Council. If you are an Intellect member with interests in spectrum issues, you should be involved.

Partying like it's 1399

Following last week’s publication of a UK national Cyber Security Strategy, the FT devoted a leader column to “Cyber security risk” highlighting the growing threat of cyber warfare to national security and resilience and its future role in conflict.

This is a subject close to the technology industry’s heart, and the recent publication of a national Cyber Security Strategy has now also focused Government’s attention on what many believe is the newest theatre of war. Whilst we at Russell Square therefore applaud the FT’s interest in the subject, I cannot help but disagree with their fundamental conclusion – that developed economies (including the UK) are better placed to withstand the collapse or compromise of our digital networks than less developed equivalents.

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As all working within the arena will have noticed, the Cabinet Office yesterday released its cyber security strategy.

Whilst we of course welcome the Government’s move to implement the strategy, I am still concerned about whether the move will be robust enough to shift thinking and bring cyber security from the periphery to the core of national security considerations.

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I’ve always wondered why we’ve not been back to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. A mixture of astronomical costs – in every sense of the word - and ebbing of the Cold War no doubt played a large part in dulling this ambition. The result today is a generation of people for whom space means little more than a decaying space station, a powerful telescope and Battlestar Galactica (if their inner geek will admit it). But the reality is that there’s a lot more going on high above our heads than just floating unshaved cosmonauts and buzz-cutted yanks, and today’s launch of the new Space Innovation and Growth Team (IGT) aims to get the UK excited about space again. (more…)

The power went out at Intellect HQ last week. No servers, no email, no phones and no coffee machine. The office ground to halt. Although it was nice to see people’s faces rising from their screens and hear the level of natter rise, it was a reminder of the hazards of national reliance on information infrastructure.

The UK is a net-enabled society. Our businesses are technology junkies, becoming ever more reliant on networked infrastructure as the years progress. And rightly so – with the use of technology we are have been able to develop our economy, improve our national health system, our security services and our police systems.

It was only yesterday I was reminded about the perils of national digitalisation whilst sat in an Intellect cyber threats group meeting. When you talk to people working in the security and resilience field, it really does drive home the importance of backing up our national move towards a digital economy with the correct processes and contingency plans to hold the system up when things go wrong.

And things really do go wrong. Hackers can bring down government websites and disrupt access to public services and power outages from manmade or natural disaster can bring businesses to their knees.

In January this year BERR and DCLG released their interim Digital Britain report. Intellect supports the move towards digitalisation and the benefits it can bring to citizens. But this move must not be made blindly – Government must consider that a move towards a digital nation means that appropriate security and resilience measures need to be put into place to ensure that new infrastructure is robust. Loss or denial of that infrastructure, whether intentional or accidental has a number of nasty consequences that can be mitigated with thorough scenario planning and appropriate security and resilience considerations. To be fully effective, security must be considered as an intrinsic part of the process, not simply an afterthought when things go wrong.

p.s title is reference to a Satnogold song about power outages - for a musical accompanyment to your blog reading please feel free to listen here

There seemed to be less suspicion amongst commuters on the London Underground this morning as the papers reported a slow-down in the spread of the Mexican swine-flu outbreak.

Having been party to discussions on pandemic flu in my role as Defence and Security Programme Exec, I knew that a full blown outbreak could be devastating. With only a third of workers off sick, business would grind to a halt, money would run out at cash points, supplies would run out at shops in under two days and hospitals would be overwhelmed. For the moment we have got off lightly, but pandemic flu remains at the top of the Governments security concerns, above natural disaster and terrorist attack.

So in one sense swine-flu can be seen as a blessing – it is a timely reminder of what could be, and a prompt for Government agencies, organisations, businesses and citizens to work together to prepare in earnest for a pandemic.

Some good work is being undertaken by business continuity experts and voluntary organisations to prepare for such eventualities, but as always, more must be done.

What is often forgotten, and should be addressed in the post swine-flu fallout is the use of technology to improve emergency response. As we have seen this week, timely information is key to directing emergency responses, and in the case of flu-outbreaks requires multi-agency, international communications. These communications are currently hampered by a lack of information standards, and any detailed testing or analysis of the adequacy of national and international information flows in emergency situations. Work must be undertaken with the technology community to ensure that in the case of a sustained pandemic outbreak, the right people have the right information to act in time to save lives.

As expected there were no big giveaways from Alistair Darling in this year’s budget. Whilst it was nowhere near as drastic as the recent second Irish budget in which taxes were hiked and budgets were slashed, the Chancellor gave a keen sense that the UK is battening down the hatches to weather the economic storm. But it was not all doom and gloom, and indeed there were plenty of positive points for the technology industry to take. So was this the first ‘Technology Budget’? (more…)

The US is changing the way it fights wars. When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made his Budget recommendations to Congress last week, it was clear that America has re-evaluated its military-strategic priorities to reflect lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Equipping forces to fight large-scale, conventional wars against other modern armies has been put on the back burner in favour of - for the time being at least - channelling funding towards fighting asymmetrical wars against asymmetrical enemies like the Taleban.

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As a newcomer to the criminal justice locale, with little previous knowledge of the history of police IT policy, the objectives of the new ISIS programme seem wholly sensible; an intelligent coordination of procurements across the 44 police authorities to drive efficiencies, a drive to improve interoperability and an overall objective to improve police productivity.
The power struggle between actors trying to implement cross-authority objectives and the 44 independent minded police authority chiefs persists, but must be overcome if the police are to embrace technological advancement, without digging themselves into an interoperability nightmare.

The idea of the re-use of information is a key objective emerging from the new police information strategy, with an emphasis on giving the public access to information, crime mapping and a focus on the public outcome. Although un-related, it appears that this tangential objective may serve to help the police forces drive efficiency and implement policy across the forces.

The public wants access to reliable and consistent information about how safe their neighbourhoods are, regardless of police authority boundaries. In the internet era, public services must learn to embrace technology, and really interact with the public to improve public services. And technological change will happen regardless of boundaries, the question is will the police be driven by technological change or will they drive the change themselves?