Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary once laughed about making passengers “spend a pound to spend a penny” by charging for toilet entry on planes. As airline competition put downward pressure on flight prices, another of his aborted proposals was to cram customers into standing-only sections, like chickens in a pen. That plan was thwarted by regulators – evidently more concerned than O’Leary was about the cracking of skulls on overhead compartments amid heavy turbulence.
But he and his low-cost rivals were more successful in extracting money from customers through a system they called speedy or priority boarding. Travelers pay a surcharge when booking flights for the privilege of standing in a separate queue – a fast lane of people who board ahead of the more parsimonious and get to spend even longer on the plane (whoo-hoo). Its equivalent has now landed in the UK’s telecom sector.
Despite appearances, operating a mobile network has a few things in common with running an airline. Both industries are capital intensive. Both are mature, struggling to find people fresh to flying or smartphone worship. Neither has an obvious growth model beyond charging for extras – overpriced food and alcohol on flights and expensive accessories for connected gadgets. Both have responded by promising a better experience for a higher fee.
Through its EE mobile subsidiary, BT even calls its new offer “Fast Lane” in a direct nod to its airline antecedents. It essentially relies on 5G network slicing to reserve capacity for a segment of users. To provide network slicing, BT has had to roll out 5G standalone (SA), a version of the mobile technology that introduced a new core, the system’s brain. In May, BT CEO Allison Kirkby claimed the operator’s 5G SA network, or what it markets as 5G+, was available to 73% of the population.
EE’s ability to do network slicing in a more dynamic fashion, activating a slice when certain conditions are met, has probably also been helped by an Ericsson upgrade of its 5G SA core. A feature called the network slice selection function (NSSF), which EE’s executives were chatting about at last year’s MWC Barcelona, is supposed to match users or applications to the most appropriate slice for their needs.
Premium no more
Even so, EE is effectively offering only two categories of service – the Fast Lane for those paying a surcharge, and a broad expanse of 5G road for the hoi polloi. The implication of calling the slice a Fast Lane is that its alternative looks more like the customs queue for anyone who now enters Europe with a UK passport.
Subscribers on premium 5G plans might have naturally assumed they were paying for the best service there is. They aren’t anymore. To enjoy that, they must now pay an additional monthly fee of £5 (US$6.80) to join a plan called “Full Works Plus,” which knocks Full Works into second place. Full Works Plus works by moving customers into the Fast Lane at busy times to do uninterrupted and buffer-free video streaming, gaming or whatever – in other words, to experience the service they thought they were paying for but couldn’t receive because there was too much congestion and not enough capacity in the area.
Capacity is finite and can be increased only by upgrading the network or activating new spectrum. As with priority boarding, this means the more people in the Fast Lane, the worse the experience for everyone else. Perhaps an even bigger problem is that more people in the Fast Lane will necessarily make it slower. If everyone in a cell had improbably signed up to Full Works Plus, nobody except EE might see any benefit.
This much was even acknowledged by incoming Ericsson CEO Per Narvinger last year. “Yes, if everyone wants to be up streaming themselves at the concert, at some point you would run out of capacity,” he said. “If you have filled out the capacity and the spectrum, then it’s full. You’re not creating more capacity by slicing.”
Just as no priority boarder can evade a flight delay, nobody on Full Works Plus will be unaffected by technical problems like a faulty basestation or the failure of signals in higher-band spectrum to penetrate walls. “F*cking Vodafone,” said a frustrated John Bradley in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, doing semaphore with his handset as he tried to obtain an indoor signal.
Bradley’s character was supposed to be a physics genius, but he had not deduced that going outside would help by the time a home invader used his head to pattern the flat window with a spiderweb of cracks. The situation deteriorated from there as Bradley experienced a different form of slicing. The network type is unlikely to have saved him.
None of this makes network slicing technically pointless. EE’s service is also aimed at small businesses that might attach more value to some kind of service level agreement – if the operator can provide it. In the US, dedicated slices seem to have been enthusiastically adopted by first responders.
Tough sell
But if Fast Lane has any impact on consumer spending, it would be unprecedented. Average revenue per user (ARPU) has been on the slide through successive generations of mobile technology pitched to consumers as faster and better than what preceded them. At Vodafone, monthly ARPU has fallen from about £40 ($54.60) a month for a contract user in 2008, when 3G was the most advanced mobile service on offer, to less than £17 this year. For quarter of a century, the industry has failed to make customers pay more for higher speeds, additional capacity or other such features.
A recent example of this came with EE’s 5G SA launch about two years ago. Back then, it was promoted as a premium offer costing £48.33 a month over three years with a TCL 50 smartphone and £62.81 with a Samsung GS24. Since then, BT’s monthly ARPU for a contract customer has dipped from £20.10 to £19.30. Today, 5G+ has become the default service for millions of customers with compatible phones. Using spectrum efficiently has been a far more successful activity for BT than monetizing 5G.
Unfortunately, dynamic slicing has made that monetization even trickier, as Howard Watson, BT’s former chief security and networks officer, seemingly recognized in March 2025. “Dynamic slicing is a little bit more complex, as you can imagine, not least on the billing side,” he said at the time. Charging for a dedicated slice with specific parameters over a given period is probably more straightforward than attaching higher prices to a service that adapts from one hour to the next based on changing needs.
The mobile network is destined to become even more adaptive and sophisticated in the next few years, reckon industry experts. With AI, operators might even be able to provide a tailored experience for every customer, based on millions of self-configuring network slices, according to Erik Ekudden, Ericsson’s chief technology officer. Set up and managed with almost no manual effort, that service will be what the average subscriber comes to expect. As a driver of sales growth, it could be a challenge.
