Summary

  • The Competition and Markets Authority found an adverse effect on competition in Great Britain's market for public-safety communications network services and imposed a charge control on Airwave Network prices, reviewed during 2026 and applied through 31 December 2029.
  • Two legal persons are bound by that Order: Airwave Solutions Limited, an English and Welsh company numbered 03985643, and Motorola Solutions, Inc. of Chicago, Delaware. The Great Britain company tracked on the directory card below appears in the same record only as one of the judicial-review applicants.

The market investigation reference was made on 25 October 2021. The final decision confirming remedies came on 5 April 2023, the full report and appendices were posted on 13 April 2023, and the operative Order was published on 31 July 2023. Twenty-one months from reference to the operative Order is not a fast machine, but it is a complete one, and the documents it produced are unusually specific about what went wrong. See the CMA final report and the case record.

The Authority found an adverse effect on competition in the Great Britain market for the supply of communications network services for public safety and ancillary services. Airwave Solutions, which operates the Airwave Network, and its owner Motorola had unilateral market power. They could charge prices materially above competitive levels because the Home Office and the emergency services had no effective alternative provider. That is the regulator's own account of the failure: not a cartel, not a hidden subsidy, just a buyer with one supplier and no second path (decision notice).

The number attached to that finding is the one that travels. The Authority estimated around £1.27 billion of supernormal profit across the period from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2029, equivalent to almost £200 million per year above what a well-functioning market would have produced. It is a model estimate with some inputs redacted for confidentiality, not an audited record of realised profit, and the distinction matters at the moment a minister or a supplier quotes it. The estimate describes what the pricing structure was expected to extract, not what has been banked.

Against that, the remedy is modest in ambition and precise in scope. The principal instrument is a charge control on the price at which Airwave Solutions provides the Airwave Network and services, subject to a review during 2026 and applied through 31 December 2029, subject to earlier network shutdown and final-settlement provisions. The Order amends and supplements the existing contractual pricing arrangements and requires charges for Core Services and Police Menu Services to follow the charge-control methodology regardless of the prices already in the contracts. Controlled parties must supply compliance information and assurance to the Home Office and the Authority. What the Order does not do is create a second supplier.

The softest and least quoted part of the decision carries the hardest question. The Authority recommended that the Home Office establish competitive pricing arrangements, or measures with similar effect, no later than the end of 2029. That is a recommendation attached to a report, not a term of a binding instrument. So the obligation with a compliance duty behind it constrains what the incumbent may charge; the obligation to build something that could replace the incumbent is advice for the buyer, due in the same year the control expires.

Then there is the point that a directory card cannot show and that most coverage skips. The Order binds Airwave Solutions Limited and Motorola Solutions, Inc. It does not bind Motorola Solutions UK Ltd, the Great Britain private company listed in the RIPE NCC public member directory with no verified ASN and no confirmed service classification (member listing, directory entry). That company appears in the final report's procedural history as one of the applicants in the judicial-review proceedings, alongside Airwave Solutions and Motorola Solutions, Inc.

That distinction is not a technicality. A registry listing establishes that a group has a legal person resident in a country. It does not establish which entity must obey a price control, which entity reports its capital expenditure to a regulator, or which entity's balance sheet carries the consequence of breaching one. Anyone tracing accountability from a directory line to a remedy has to cross that gap deliberately rather than assume it away.

The conflict that would have made this a cleaner story was dismantled before judgment. Motorola's combined role, operating Airwave while delivering the replacement programme's Lot 2, ended by agreement with the Home Office on 19 December 2022, under four months before the final decision. The Authority recorded that the dual role had contributed to market development between 2016 and that date, and that it was no longer a current feature of the adverse effect on competition. This is a historical finding about how the market developed, not a live finding of capture.

Stating it as present capture would misdescribe the record; stating it as harmless would misdescribe it too, because the market the remedy now prices was shaped during the years the two roles were held together.

The challenge failed on the merits and then failed again. The Competition Appeal Tribunal dismissed the application on 22 December 2023 and the Court of Appeal dismissed the further challenge on 30 January 2025, leaving the charge control in place with a 2026 review ahead of it and 2029 as its horizon. The framework is settled. What is unsettled is whether anything will exist at the end of it.

So apply the test that separates a bill from a repair. If, when the control ends, the public record shows audited figures in place of modelled ones, published buyer-side milestones for a replacement capability, and a contracted shutdown date with consequences attached, then this reading fails and the delivery story survives: the price was a bridge, and the bridge was built. If instead 2029 arrives with no audited numbers, no published milestones and no contracted switch-off, the charge control will have been a receipt for a monopoly that outlived its remedy.

Nothing in the record read here establishes that a shutdown has happened, or that 31 December 2029 is a shutdown date at all. It is the date the price stops and the recommendation falls due. Everything that would make it something more has yet to be written down.