700MHz: European broadcasters draw a line in the sand

By Barry Flynn, Contributing Editor, Videonet

This time next year, the World Radiocommunication Conference 2015 (WRC-15) will be in full swing in Geneva. Run by the ITU, its task is to review and, if necessary, revise the Radio Regulations – an international treaty that governs, among other issues, how radio-frequency spectrum is used. 

High on the agenda will be an apparently arcane technical issue: the possible award of co-primary status to mobile in the 470-694MHz band in Region 1.

Region 1 includes Africa, the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, parts of the Middle East – and Europe, where that frequency band is currently used for DTT. What ‘co-primary status’ means in this case is that – if WRC-15 so determines – it could now be occupied either by DTT or mobile. As technology stands at the moment, it is practically impossible for the two types of network to share the same frequencies.

The matter is complicated by the fact that the band immediately above this (694-790 MHz, dubbed ‘the 700MHz band’) was unexpectedly accorded co-primary status by the previous WRC-12 conference, a switch which is to take effect (in theory) as of 2015. In many EU territories, 700MHz is also occupied by terrestrial broadcasting. 

It is worth noting that the band immediately above that – 800MHz – was allocated on a co-primary basis for mobile use at WRC-07. In the circumstances, it is not difficult to see why to Europe’s broadcasters, it looks very much as if the mobile sector is engaged in a rolling land-grab at their expense – and so far, it appears to have succeeded. 

The mobile sector has consistently argued that it needs the bandwidth for mobile broadband because of surging demand from consumers to stream video over mobile networks. 

The mobile operators have also been able to leverage the fact that the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe – which states that all people in Europe should have access to high-speed broadband by 2020 – perceives mobile use of the lower frequencies as an ideal way to fulfil its aim of bringing broadband to rural areas fixed networks cannot reach. 

Already, several national regulators – including Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK – have toed the EC line, saying they either plan to make 700MHz available for mobile services towards the end of this decade, or are at least likely to.

However, it would be a mistake to think that the mobile operators are having things all their own way. While the group that represents Europe’s terrestrial broadcasters, the EBU, has recognized that realpolitik requires it (eventually) to cede the 700MHz band, it has mounted a fierce counter-offensive against any deeper incursions into UHF territory.

At the beginning of the year, it published a paper entitled Crystal Ball, Tea Leaves, or Mathematics – Forecasting Data Traffic for Mobile Services, which effectively rubbished the data growth forecast being submitted to WCR-15 by the mobile industry, criticising not only its underlying assumptions but its mathematical methodology. The authors concluded that “A number of erroneous elements have been identified in this report leading to the conclusion in this paper that the spectrum requirements […] are greatly overestimated.”

More recently, as part of a terrestrial broadcasting consortium that included Abertis, Arqiva, the BBC, Broadcast Networks Europe, and TDF, the EBU commissioned a report from consultancy Athea which concluded that – even using the most aggressive mobile traffic forecasts – “the costs of clearing DTT from the spectrum (EUR38.5bn) significantly outweigh the potential value of using the spectrum for mobile (EUR10.3bn) by a factor of almost four.” Half the cost was taken up simply with providing consumers with alternative digital TV reception equipment, Athea found.

For Peter MacAvock, who is responsible for spectrum matters at the EBU, the question is not so much the rights and wrongs of such debates as the fact that currently, national administrations decide how to enact WRC rulings, and neighbouring countries’ different choices under a co-primary regime would be bound to conflict.

“For example,” he points out, ”if you wanted to deploy DVB-T2 in France and LTE in Germany in the same frequency band, the no-man’s-land required between the two types of network would be so great as to render the UHF frequency spectrum useless for great swathes of the region in the area of the border, in fact probably for the whole country. It just wouldn’t work technically. Of course, if one country was prepared to give up its rights [to choose broadcast or mobile in the UHF band], then we wouldn’t have a problem. But, of course, that’s not going to happen, so you would have a negotiation stalemate.”

The other practical issue is that in the case of some countries, there simply isn’t currently anywhere for existing DTT services to migrate to. “The particular issue in Italy is that there are popular national TV services in the 700 MHz band,” says MacAvock. “Because the Italians have chosen a DTT scenario with 19 national multiplexes (rather than the 6-7 in other European countries), there is no room for these services to move out of the 700 MHz band into lower frequencies – it would require a complete re-organisation of frequencies and a reduction in the number of services.”

The EC is currently consulting a number of industry expert groups on spectrum issues, and so far, they tend to back the EBU’s warnings. One of the many conclusions in a recent report entitled ‘A Long Term Vision for the UHF broadcasting band’ from CEPT, the co-ordinating body for European state telecommunications and postal organisations, was that while networks of similar types could co-exist on the same frequency on either side of a national border without too much trouble, this did not apply when one of them was a broadcast network and the other a mobile one.

“Co-existence between a cellular uplink and a broadcast or cellular downlink network is challenging with similar network architectures as encountered nowadays,” said the report. “The studies conclude that there is a need for a separation distance of hundreds of kilometres.” (Author’s italics)

Meanwhile, Pascal Lamy’s recent report to the EC from his High Level Group, which studied the same topic, argued for a lengthy transition period for the release of the 700MHz band in order to facilitate “the least costly and disruptive transition in terms of cross-border co-ordination and equipment upgrade for operators and consumers, which means sufficient lead-time.” 

His suggested deadline is accordingly 2020 +/- two years, depending on how high DTT take-up is in the country concerned. This is rather sooner than the EBU would have liked, but MacAvock notes that both the Lamy and CEPT reports “have been overwhelmingly in favour of this notion of retaining broadcasting in the sub-700MHz  band.” 

Indeed, Lamy recommended that in order that “reassurance [be] given to terrestrial broadcasting for a next cycle of investments,” safeguards should be put in place to guard against access to spectrum below 700MHz until 2030. “This should be backed by a consistent EU position at future WRCs (starting from WRC-15) against co-primary allocation of spectrum below the 700 MHz band to the mobile service,” he declared.

In the meantime, the EBU wants both sides to “work hard on a technology which would combine high-tower, high-power broadcasting with low-power, low-tower one-to-one telecommunications.” This could be ‘5G or 6G’, but “let’s commonly develop a technology that meets the requirements and therefore could be a candidate technology for a truly converged approach to frequency usage,” urges MacAvock.

The extent to which such recommendations will influence the EC’s apparently pro-mobile position remains to be seen. MacAvock believes the European regulator is “seeking increased EU-wide harmonization of spectrum policy through greater control of spectrum regulation,” and that while there is a “power play” going on between it and national administrations, Member States still remain firmly in control of their own spectrum.

That leaves WRC-15 next year. While MacAvock is reluctant to predict the outcome, he notes several positives for the EBU position. First, the ITU and the mobile sector have accepted the EBU’s recommendations on how to minimise interference issues as the 700MHz band transitions to mobile services. That means that “the final band plan that will be used in Europe will be a better reflection of how you might encourage co-existence between broadcasting and telecommunications,” he says.

Meanwhile, indications so far are that “the vast majority of the countries in the African region and in the Arab states region are not proposing co-primary access” for the 470-694MHz band,” he says. But “anything could happen”, and “it could still go either way.” 

Still, 700MHz might yet turn out to have been the right place for Europe’s broadcasters to have drawn a line in the sand.