I remember Vodafone was very excited about this and O2 has not fully rolled out the ability to use 3G on their 900mhz spectrum, however Vodafone is still silent if that's happening and when.

Anyone has an insider's knowledge if that's happening at all?

Yup, no info anywhere

It's very difficult to refarm the frequency to 3G, you can't do it without impacting any 2G only handset base you have. I could only guess on their internal KPIs Vodafone do not see a ROI in reframing at present.

OAS

Overuse of Acronyms to be Supercilious

Perhaps Vodafone will not refarm their 900MHz bandwidth for UMTS and use it for LTE? 900MHz would be a suitable frequency range.

If Vodafone were allowed to refarm 900MHz to LTE and Everything Everywhere allowed to refarm 1800MHz it is going to get very confusing for manufacturers from a compatability point of view.

You'd have the "main" auctioned frequencies of 800MHz and 2600MHz and then 900MHz and 1800MHz too! Would the tablet/smartphone manufacturers equip their devices for such a random number of non-standard bands? Thats just over here - we've already seen the new iPad set up for the US frequencies of 700MHz and 2100MHz.

If the individual operators are allowed to do their own thing I feel it would be for "dongles" only as these are fairly easy to allocate to individual network operators.

I guess they are working on getting 42mbps DC-HSDPA rather then 900mhz, but i have seen in a few places 900 Mhz 3G probably just on trial.