Last week, we covered the frontier years of mobile devices in the 1980s in the UK with BT’s Andy Sutton. This week, we move forward to the democratization of the mobile phone and the devastatingly expensive spectrum auction of 2000, when UK operators paid £22.5 billion for their 3G licenses and had small change left to build their networks. Some of the innovations used by UK MNOs in the early 2000s are useful lessons for operators in 2024, with little cash in the bank for their own infrastructure projects. In late 1992, Neil Papworth rang in a new age of mobile communication with an SMS message to his colleague at Vodafone that read: ‘Merry Christmas.’ The text was sent from…