TV's digital dividend could be superfast broadband
Carter mulls spectrum for speed bargain
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Lord Carter could recommend that the government give away the old analogue TV spectrum to telecoms companies in exchange for commitments to invest in fibre rollout for high speed internet access, according to the latest leak from his forthcoming Digital Britain report.
Flogging the UHF band to the highest bidder once it is vacated in 2012 had been expected to raise billions of pounds for the Exchequer. Carter's report will instead suggest it is used as a bargaining chip to extract the private billions that will be required for UK broadband speeds to remain competitive with economic rivals worldwide, the Sunday Times reports.
Free UHF spectrum could allow BT or others to offer high speed wireless data services, including to areas where fibre deployment would be uneconomical.
The "Spectrum for Speed" strategy has been promoted by Nesta, an innovation quango. Its chief executive Jonathan Kestenbaum said: "In unprecedented economic times, we have to think imaginatively about how we can invest in big infrastructure projects while not cutting off large swathes of communities from economic and social development."
Internet industry coalition the Broadband Stakeholder Group has estimated that a ubiquitous fibre to the home network could cost more than £29bn. BT has so far committed £1.5bn to rollout fibre as far as roadside cabinets in densely populated areas, proposing downstream speeds of up to 40Mbit/s.
Virgin Media's cable network covers about half the country and there are no plans to extend it. It is currently being upgraded to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which the firm says will be able to carry data downstream at more than 200Mbit/s. Both incumbents view the potential to deliver high definition multichannel TV over the internet as one of the main commercial attractions of next generation networks.
Last week details of Carter's anti-piracy proposals began to emerge. It has also been reported he will recommend a merger between Channel 4 and Five.
The wide-ranging report is due to be published next Monday, January 26. ®
COMMENTS
Re: UHF TV band won't be freed up
A couple of corrections.
Firstly, I believe there are no plans whatsoever to add more digital muxes - that would take away from the spectrum to be flogged off and so hit Gov coffers. So six muxes it is then, and no more - unless you are one of the millions of people on the thousands of local fill-in transmissions that will only get the three main muxes.
Then, once analogue is turned off, I believe the digital signal is capable of running as a "single frequency network" where all the transmitters use the same frequency. So instead of every transmitter using a different frequency to any adjacent ones, and so having to use large numbers of channels over the country, we'll only need the six leaving most of the spectrum available for flog off.
@AC 12:56
No, they aren't going to do any higher bitrate - that would mean less channels per mux and would require more muxes. Since that would mean less spectrum to flog off, it isn't going to happen.
Please give us more TV bitrate...
...cos most Freeview channels are horrible to watch. With a bit more bandwidth it could be DVD quality.
I sometimes wonder if it's a conspiracy, degrade "SD" to make "HD" seem more appealing?
Virgin?
Virgin can't deliver anything even approaching their advertised speeds, let alone anything able to support their current customer base AND HD.
Pipe dreams.. Virgin never deliver.
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