German 700MHz auction signals start of Euro spectrum flogoffs

Re: Naturally....

Yes the population density is higher on average - but German mobile ARPUs are also a fraction (perhaps 1/2 to 1/3) of those in the US, so there is much less opportunity to invest per pop. And there's lots of unserved 'wide open space' in the US so the practical density is in fact much higher than your comparison suggests.

Re: Planned Obsolescence

If the cost of a TV license is seven times the cost of a new set top box, the economics are not in question - more a matter to the consumer of whether they or the network provider pays and whether the picture quality is worse, as good as or better than before.

Re: Planned Obsolescence

"Still mad about having to ditch my Pace Freeview tuner."

It was extremely irritating that the SetPal systems all took a shortcut on the EPG.

Even more so that the company disappeared and the code for the decoders went walkies. It might have been possible to kludge up a fix had it been available.

Re: Planned Obsolescence

How would selling off part of the TV spectrum obsolete a TV? It would be able to tune to channels that no longer exist, while newer TVs wouldn't be able to tune to those channels since there'd be no point.

If they change the modulation or compression then your old TV wouldn't be able to tune those channels. If they do that for all channels THEN your old TV is obsolete. But that has nothing specifically to do with the sale of spectrum.

If you're concerned, just buy the cheapest TV you can and it'll probably break down before 2022 anyway :)

Re: Spectrum auctions...

Isn't leases what they are in practice?

The winner of the auction doesn't get to own the spectrum, they just get a license to use it. It remains regulated by the State who acts as an independent creator of the market. Often the regulator will have additional conditions such as X% of the population must be served by such and such date, it can only used for technology A, B or C, etc. etc.

Re: Now I have to explain to my bosses...

Why did you buy 700Mhz mics 2 years ago? The industry has been going on about it since at least 2010.

Also, Sennheiser will usually change the frequency bands for you for a fee.

Re: 800MHz sell off may have been a mistake, 700MHz is Greed.

Not entirely correct. In rural settings cell density would remain constant with the superior propagation characteristics of the lower band spectrum extending range and the additional frequency increasing aggregate capacity. In urban settings lower band frequency is likely to be deployed on all masts (it certainly had been here) with antenna tilt and tuning (transmitting at lower levels than the maximum permitted) used to prevent overlap whilst still gaining an advantage in building penetration and again in aggregate capacity. You can always transmit at a lower power and our tilt the antenna to reduce range but you can't transmit above the legal limit, hence low band spectrum is more versatile and therefore valuable. Plus any additional spectrum is valuable as demand increases rapidly. Whilst your comments about cell size are superficially correct the lower band spectrum would be used in addition to existing mid and high band spectrum so the only load on the low band spectrum would be those subscribers out of range of the mid band spectrum. It hadn't been the case elsewhere that it resulted in any significant decrease in sites. Providers that typically had low band spectrum have actually been hard at work increasing their site density as a method of increasing capacity as well as adding mid band spectrum.

Also regarding iptv, you are mistaken, ip multicast or whatever is called this week had been around for a long time and would result in very little strain on fixed networks. It actually makes a fair bit of sense to switch to using an ip broadcast solution apart from for those wanting a mobile connection or those not able to be serviced by a fixed line connection.

Re: 800MHz sell off may have been a mistake, 700MHz is Greed.

Putting my "RF engineer" hat on.

Larger cells are for less dense areas. Large and small cells happily coexist (urban and rural areas)

1800 and 2100MHz don't penetrate into buildings particularly well, let alone 2600MHz and there's no technical reason why a 7/800MHz cell needs to be larger than 900MHz or even 1800MHz ones. It's all down to transmitter power and the way you stack your antennas and 7-900MHz can all use the same stack.

The bandwidth allocation is the same in each frequency band, so the capacity is the same.

Terrestrial DTT is a crock anyway. It made sense up to the point when LNAs were expensive but a suitable dish/LNA for Freesat is less than 30 quid (50 if you need more than 2 outputs) would eliminate millions of pounds of costs in distributing and broadcasting signals around the countryside and likely save a few lives from people falling off roofs whilst trying to get a signal.

Re: 800MHz sell off may have been a mistake, 700MHz is Greed.

> It's a fact that Comreg and Ofcom in Europe want to abolish Terrestrial TV entirely and have people only pay for TV via Internet (not scaleable for 20M simultaneous HD viewers), Satellite and Cable

Wireless TV broadcast should be gone by 2050, its a horribly ineffective use of the spectrum. The 20M viewers is the peak rate. Plus when you consider the majority of the population have a fixed line into their homes it frees up the airwaves for the more versatile IP traffic. IPv6 has multicast built in, that should be a catalyst for improvements.

Plus facilitating people watching the Xfactor on a Saturday night should not be a network engineers priority.