The government will adjust the rules if they lose. Brown needs all the money he can get, and if 2.6GHz is worth less if they can re-use 900MHz then he won't want the telcos to know that before the 2.6GHz auction in order to get more money.

Looks to me like its time to call an end to OFCOM as both an organisation and arbiter of spectrum usage. Overall OFCOM is a concept that has outlived both its time and usefulness in terms of allocating spectrum, as it does not appear to have either the leadership, political skills, or technical capability to understand the fundamental physics involved, nor a basic CSE level understanding of the associated economic implications. As a minimum, scrap the whole OFCOM organisation and start again - maybe we might even consider something really radical like reverting to something like the Radiocomms Agency structure. At least they had both the technical skills and (broadly) political neutrality to do the best they could to balance the needs of the various competing demands for spectrum.

Spectrumguru