EU eyes UHF spectrum: What do you think, biz bods... broadband?

Re: It not about the Consumer. But Big Business and Regulator Income.

470-790MHz

Should be enough bandwidth for all the IPTV porn channels we need for the next few years....

Re: It not about the Consumer. But Big Business and Regulator Income.

I disagree. Terrestrial TV is OK (not great, but OK) if you happen to be within range of a full power main transmitter site, but it's awful otherwise.

When I moved in to my current house I thought I'd give terrestrial another chance (having up to that point lived in an area with no terrestrial coverage at all). What greeted me was frankly rubbish. The local relay transmitter only carries 3 multiplexes, meaning no ITV 4 (handy for BTCC) and at the time no film 4 and many other interesting channels.

So what did I do? Hooked a Freesat HD PVR to the leftover sky install and voila, a decent channel mix with fewer faults (local mast went faulty for a month before anyone bothered to fix it).

Re: It not about the Consumer. But Big Business and Regulator Income.

Yes, I was wondering where the consumer representation was on this advisory board.

The only people on it are those who are likely to financially gain, and not those who will lose.

My household has Sky on one telly, and limited IPTV on two others (through consoles and BluRay players), and the other 5 rely on terrestrial TV.

Living in the sticks, where LTE and Fibre services have not yet reached, and where broadband is currently limited to ADSL 2+ Annex M, and even 3G and DAB services are very patchy, it is unlikely that IPTV for the whole household is realistic.

Re: Less TV, more wifi

"Engineers have done a good job with garbage spectrum"

There's nothing wrong with the 2.4 or 5Ghz wifi spectrum - its endless contention from your neighbours routers and the low max power that causes the problems, not your microwave oven. This won't change much if its moved to UHF. If you're really having problems with your wifi just use an ethernet cable.

Re: Less TV, more wifi

All swapping to UHF for domestic wifi will do is mean more interference over a wider area. I dobut they'll expand the number of channels to alleviate the real problem of 2.4 GHz

Re: All about the money

The Digital Dividend existed. The Regulators might not have got as much as they would have liked, but they DID get lots for auctioning the spectrum 790 MHz to 862 MHz formerly used by Analogue TV.

That was the real Digital Dividend. The consumer was lucky to get anything extra (HD, some more channels and real widescreen).

Re: falling standards at the Reg?

No - its power crazy bastards.

Re: Whenever I hear of UK terrestrial broadcasting I start to break out in tears

But isn't cable penetration far higher in Germany than it is here? And you used to have (not sure it's still the case, though) a much stronger tradition of FTA satellite than we did. I know now you have things like Sky Deutschland trying to convince you that everything has to be pay, but for a long time places like Germany managed to do very well without satellite being centrally organised, a fixed EPG and so on.

In the Netherlands, cable penetration is over 90%; it's much much lower here.

To a pretty large degree, the UK has relied much more on terrestrial broadcasting in the past than a lot of other countries, notwithstanding Mr Murdoch's attempts to change that. The old analogue services covered most of the country very well, with lots of small relays, rather than the black spots that others countries put up with.

We only have 13% of households connected to cable, and I suspect actual reach of cable is not much over 50-60% (can't find the figures this morning); satellite has generally been associated with pay TV, and thanks in part to the BBC, we have a pretty strong tradition of free to air telly.

All that has helped shaped what we have today in terms of terrestrial services. Unfortunately, the spivs of the mobile industry want to grab some of that space for themselves; while coordinating spectrum at an EU level makes sense in many ways, it will be a shame (for consumers, though not big businesses) if the end result is to squeeze the terrestrial UK services so that they can only offer a small fraction of what is available now.

This squeeze is why, perhaps a little counterintuitively, we have just gained some extra HD channels; wider adoption of DVB-T2/H.264 kit will enable a later switch to that standard for SD, freeing up space for other uses.