Pay For Rail Improvements In London By Facilitating Electronic Money

I live in London. And, when I travel on the London transport rail network I use something called an Oyster card. This card, allows me to check-in at the station where I join the network. And then, I check out using my Oyster card when I leave the network. The system charges of my Oyster card the cost of the journey. I don't have to wait in line to buy tickets. Neither do I have to make sure I have enough change or cash.

Now, supposing London transport extended the ability to charge money to an Oyster card by allowing newspaper vendors at stations to charge an Oyster card. Pretty soon, other vendors will also start accepting these cards for small payments. Not long after that shops and businesses in London, realising that just about everybody has an Oyster card will begin to accept them as a way of making school cash payments.

Pretty soon, even people who never travel on London transport will start carrying an Oyster card. And then shortly after that shops and businesses outside of London will also accept Oyster cards. After all, many people who work in London commute from outside.

After a while, London transport will be able to sell the whole Oyster card business to a bank for a significant sum of money. This can be used to pay for improvements to the rail network.

Free Mobile Internet

so, I live in the UK. And we are just in the process of rolling out 4 G mobile Internet. This technology promises extremely high speeds for its users. No doubt this speed will come at a price. But I'm not talking about paying for mobile Internet access. I'm talking about free mobile access.

It occurs to me that our government has missed a trick here. I guess, that they have auctioned off the spectrum to the highest bidders. This is what any normal economist would tell them to do. However, they are a government, and that they should not always act like a profit maximising organisation.

Supposing, the UK government had incorporated a public service requirement into their conditions for rewarding access to spectrum. Such a public service requirement might simply require any operator to provide free access to their network. Albeit, at a very low speeds. the speed would have to be sufficiently low that the service could not be used to carry VoIP phone calls. Such a proposal would open up the mobile Internet to a large number of people who would not pay for it without cannibalising the customers of the network provider.

Costs could be controlled by allowing the network providers to agree amongst themselves which of them would provide the public service Internet access for a given area.

Such a move would have wide benefits for society as a whole. And, might well benefit the operators as they may well find that once people experience the joys of the mobile Internet at low speeds, they then decide to upgrade to a faster speed.