Ofcom have announced that they will auction the so-called Digital Dividend spectrum that results from their switch to Digital TV. They will use auctions for all but one of the packages. A beauty contest will be used for a package of spectrum allocated for Programme Making and Special Events they don’t think there is enough competition for those services (then why allocate it?).

In brief, the spectrum on sale:

“The digital dividend is in the UHF band in the frequencies 470-862 MHz. It is made up of two types of spectrum:
Cleared spectrum: 112 MHz that will become available as a result of digital switchover (channels numbered 31-35, 37, 39-40 and 63-68) and a further 8 MHz (channel 36) that will be cleared of its existing use by airport radar in March 2009.
Interleaved spectrum: the ‘white space’ that exists geographically between television transmitters to prevent interference between them; in any one location there is typically a large amount of interleaved spectrum available (up to 208MHz), but the number and nature of the frequencies available vary from place to place.”

And on cognitive radios:

“Cognitive radio. This is a new wireless technology that shares with other services by detecting when spectrum is not being used. It is hoped that cognitive radio devices will be able to work together to create so-called ‘mesh networks’ that can support a range of wireless applications such as high-speed broadband access across urban and rural locations. Ofcom is proposing to allow cognitive radio to use the interleaved spectrum provided it can be shown this does not cause interference to other spectrum users.”

Press Release
Digital Divided Review (more detail)

As reported in a post earlier this year, Shared Spectrum Company carried out a spectrum occupancy survey in Dublin city centre over a two day period from Comreg’s elevated monitoring site. They recently published a report on their findings and it’s available for free from their website.

Some of the key insights pointed out in this report are that “…spectrum occupancy during a high usage period in a normal work week is only 13.6% in this city…spectrum occupancy in Dublin, Ireland is similar to the ones in Chicago and New York. This proves that the inefficient usage of frequency spectrum is a problem not only in USA, but also in other European countries.” [Tugba Erpek, Karl Steadman, David Jones, Shared Spectrum Company, "Dublin Ireland Spectrum Occupancy Measurements Collected On April 16-18, 2007", p.34]

The deadline for making yourself known to the FCC if you want to participate in the 700MHz auction scheduled to begin on Jan 24th, 2008, is today. It will be another few days before we publish the measurement data collected from just outside Denver to Washington DC in this band. When we do, you will be able to see a almost cross-country glimpse of what may bring in a minimum of approximately $20 billion in auction revenue for the FCC.