Beyond the digital dividend – is it time to open up UHF to operators?
The release of digital dividend frequencies for mobile services, created by the switchover from analogue to digital-terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasting, has been one of the most prominent changes to UHF spectrum allocation that has taken place around the world in recent years.
The process of switching from analogue to DTT transmission has been taking place in many countries for up to ten years, and was already well underway in some countries when the decision was made at the ITU World Radio Conference (WRC) in 2007 to re-allocate parts of the released UHF spectrum for mobile services. That decision prompted government action around the world to re-farm UHF frequencies that were previously planned for DTT use, for mobile services.
In countries where DTT networks were already established and operating, this action resulted in DTT networks having to be re-planned to make the proposed dividend frequencies available for mobile and other wireless broadband services.
While this re-planning resulted in additional costs, the underlying rationale is to enable mobile and wireless broadband services to access valuable spectrum below 1GHz. These serviceshave been demonstrated to create significant and greater economic benefits to national economies than those created by DTT. Studies such as Analysys Mason’s digital dividend report for the European Commission set out these benefits in detail.
More recently, government targets set in a number of countries to bring new superfast broadband services into widespread use have highlighted the potential need for further spectrum to be made available for mobile and wireless broadband services, over and above that already offered. In Europe, this aligns with the EU Digital Agenda, and universal broadband service objectives, with the UK government, for example, indicating some 500MHz of additional spectrum is required to achieve these broadband objectives. Release of some of this 500MHz is already in preparation (via the digital dividend and release of new bands, such as 2.6GHz); however, identification of more spectrum is needed.
Commentary by Janette Stewart, Analysys Mason - read the full story here