Nothing to do with Apple – Ofcom to trade off UHF bandwidth
With digital switchover beginning at the end of this year and due to be complete by 2012, UK communication industry regulator Ofcom will find themselves with a whole load of spare UHF bandwidth and no analogue TV service to use it.
Their plan is to auction off these vacant parts of the UK electromagentic spectrum as they become available, which could be licensed by, radio, TV, broadband companies, mobile networks or whatever new technologies come along, given that the licenses will be both flexible and tradable over time.
The current UHF signal makes up for 128MHz of the spectrum and is particularly interesting as it’s of a wavelength suitable to cover large distances and wide enough to carry large amounts of information, currently the analogue TV service.
Now, this may not sound like the most thrilling news in the world but it does open up the doors for a mobile internet solution with the kind of coverage that could put the likes of 3G to shame. It could also just bring along even more useless radio stations. Bring on the switchover and we’ll see what goes.
(via PC Advisor)
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