The communications minister, Lord Carter, has summoned the UK's top five mobile networks to a meeting to discuss plans to provide universal broadband access to the population by 2012.

The proposal to provide 'broadband for all' was first put forward in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, which was released last month. Under the plans, every household in Britain would be supplied a minimum two megabyte broadband connection.

The five networks will meet with Kip Meek, head of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, the government's independent advisory panel. The talks are expected to focus on persuading Vodafone and O2 to share a portion of their radio spectrum - first given to them in the 1980s - with the other three networks. Any airwaves given to these networks - T-Mobile, 3 and Orange - would then be used by them to provide mobile broadband services.

In early 2008, Ofcom made a similar suggestion, which was met with a legal challenge by Vodafone and O2. However, Lord Carter's Digital Britain report states that the companies must come to a solution by April this year, or the government will impose one. The Guardian reports that, in return for giving up spectrum to their rivals at a frequency of 900MHz, Vodafone and O2 hope to receive some of the airwaves made free by switching off the analogue TV signal.

According to the paper, the five networks have suggested that the government should abandon its planned auction of 3G spectrum - which these operators bought for more than £22 billion - if it wants to see universal broadband access by 2012.