UK digital terrestrial multiplex operator Arqiva presented its award of the 600 MHz spectrum (550 ‘ 606 MHz) as a victory for Freeview TV, but it actually represents final defeat in its campaign to hang onto to the 700 MHz band (694 ‘ 790 MHz). The UK is one of the first to allocate 600 MHz with Arqiva being the only candidate in a move that is likely to be followed elsewhere in Europe, especially as spectrum policy has to be coordinated across borders given the close proximity of the countries. Even when two countries are not adjacent, like Germany and the UK, the effects of their spectrum policies ripple through the countries such as Belgium in between, so that there is still need for some coordination.
Certainly Arqiva broadcaster customers are less enamored of the move down to 600 MHz in order to clear the 700 MHz band for mobile operators. The BBC reacted with surprise to a recent speech by Ofcom board member Patricia Hodgson, which appeared to confirm that the game was up for the 700 MHz band when the corporation understood the debate was still ongoing. Hodgson said, “we will work actively towards international harmonization and release of the 700 MHz band for mobile broadband,’ adding ‘at the same time we are taking steps to secure the future of DTT by making alternative spectrum available in the 600 MHz band and supporting a platform transition to more efficient broadcast standards.’
The BBC’s head of spectrum projects, Catherine Smadja, admitted to being ‘a little surprised by Hodgson’s statement. ‘In the UK, as I understood, we are still consulting people and no decision has been made on allocation of 700 MHz,’ she said. This is clearly not the case. Even if regulator Ofcom has yet to admit publicly that the debate is over, its award of the 600 MHz band to Arqiva is a clear signal that the future for DTT lies there.
Meanwhile the French government has stated its intentions more clearly, with its minister for the digital economy, Fleur Pellerin, confirming its intention to release the 700 MHz band for mobile, which she said was in line with policy in both the UK and Germany. Technically Germany, like the UK, is still at the consultation stage but the French have decided to jump the gun and admit it is a done deal.
The immediate impact of this move will be positive for Free to Air (FTA) viewers, certainly in the UK where Arqiva has announced it will enable up to 10 additional HD channels to be carried by 2014. But this is because the award is linked to deployment of the second generation DVB-T2, which brings a capacity improvement of at least 50%, through use of improved Forward Error Correction (FEC), not counting the impact of the mandatory H.264/MPEG-4 compression in cases where that was not already deployed. Arqiva’s new license for 600 MHz spectrum is effective immediately, lasting for at least five years and probably until 2026. In fact the clearance of DTT from the 700 MHz band is only likely to begin around 2018, as Ofcom has hinted. ‘We anticipate that any 700 MHz clearance would be conducted through a rolling program of retunes, with different transmitters retuning at different times,’ said Ofcom in a statement. ‘Based on previous experience with digital switch over and the clearance of 800 MHz spectrum for 4G mobile, we anticipate that fully cleared spectrum would be available for release two to three years after the first retune took place.
As Ofcom indicated here, the shuffling down of DTT to lower spectrum bands began with the 800 MHz band (790 ‘ 862 MHz) around five years ago, but then it was associated with the so called first digital dividend resulting from analog switch over. Naively perhaps broadcasters and DTT multiplex operators assumed that was the end of it and felt they could live with that. But as demand for mobile services continue to grow along with an explosion in data consumption, pressure for a second digital dividend mounted. The argument then from the mobile camp was that further spectrum could be liberated as a result of efficiency improvements in DTT transmission such as the better FEC employed in DVB-T2. Broadcasters contended that these capacity improvements would be mopped up by growing numbers of HD channels at ever greater resolutions, especially with UHDTV appearing on the horizon. The EBU (European Broadcasting Union) has been especially vociferous in its campaign.
As far as Europe in particular was concerned, matters came to a head at the World Radio Spectrum Conference (WRC) 2012 early in that year when a group of Middle Eastern and African countries pushed through a commitment to make more spectrum available for mobile broadband in the band around 800MHz in addition to the amount granted via the first digital dividend in 2008. At that time there were variations between European Union (EU) member states, but generally 20% to 25% of the UHF spectrum liberated through analog switch off was given over to mobile broadband, which was more than the whole original spectrum allocated for European GSM cellular services.
Many broadcasters had still assumed right up till then that there would be no further spectrum reallocation. At WRC-12 many observers were surprised by the agreement to re-allocate the 700 MHz frequencies for mobile use in Region 1, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa). Regions 2 and 3, covering the Americas and Asia ‘ Pacific respectively, had already agreed in 2007 to include mobile as a primary allocation almost all the way from 600MHz up to 960MHz. At that stage, Region 1 set the lower bound at 790MHz ‘ below that, only broadcasting was permitted.
The African and Middle Eastern countries were therefore able to argue that this new agreement at WRC 12 would simply bring Region 1 into line with the rest of the world, leading to a state of global spectral harmonization and bringing economies of scale and easier international roaming, among other benefits. This argument won some support inside the EU, which has dithered over spectrum policy ever since.
The EBU meanwhile argued that this WRC12 decision reneged on the earlier agreements around 2008 when the European Commission made it clear that enough spectrum should be reserved for broadcasters to develop advanced HD and 3G services. But the Commission then looked like buying the argument that global harmonization could be achieved, and that further improvements in compression and spectral efficiency meant that broadcasters should be able to make do with less bandwidth than had been thought.
The only real consolation for European broadcasters resulting from that WRC12 ambush was that the European Commission has agreed that they would not have to pay for the spectrum reallocation. The Commission also suggested that a move from high-power Multiple Frequency networks to low-power Single Frequency Networks would save power and enable more services to be transmitted inside a given spectral band. The Commission announced it would do a spectrum inventory to look at current use and future demand, as part of its spectral planning process.
Against all this uncertainty DVB-T2 continues to roll out, not just in Europe, but also across large parts of Asia, with Russia deploying it ahead of schedule and Prasar Bharati, the Broadcasting Corporation of India, planning to introduce DVB-T2 services at 19 locations after publishing a tender.
Yet right in its European heartland, rather a black hole has emerged for DVB-T2 in the continent’s largest TV market, Germany. This partly reflects that country’s history of being relatively late into pay TV and of widespread deployment of cable TV to MDUs (Multi Dwelling Units) and also satellite, providing a range of FTA (Free to Air) channels. Analog terrestrial shed most of its subscribers in the 1990s and currently of the country’s 37.5 million households with a TV set, around 47% still receive their TV by cable, 45% satellite, and 4% each for IPTV and DTT. By contrast in the UK, 11 million of the 24.7 million households have Freeview DTT on their main TV set and a further 9 million on secondary TVs. The picture is similar in France, where 50% of the 32.7 million registered digital accesses are through DTT, with 61% or 16.6 million of the country’s 26.6 million households owning at least one DTT receiver.
Only Germany’s neighbor Austria has similar low levels of DTT usage, but the attitude there is very different. Until the end of 2012 it had appeared that DTT would be on the rise in Germany because of the momentum behind DVB-T2 across the rest of Europe. That culminated in November 2012 when the Conference of Directors of the State Media Authorities (DLM) representing broadcasters announced support for DVB-T2 adoption throughout the country. At that time public broadcaster ARD had already announced that it would make the transition to DVB-T2 from 2016 onwards.
But the DLM did stress that private broadcasters had not yet declared their hand and called on them to do so. It probably doesn’t like what it has heard since, because firstly in January 2013 MABB, the local media authority of the German federal states Berlin and Brandenburg, argued that the Internet would soon be a better TV distribution platform for Germany than DVB-T2 and endorsed a decision by private commercial broadcaster RTL to disengage from DTT altogether. While MABB did ask RTL to continue DTT broadcasts for now this was only until the Internet was deemed fit to over its role.
MABB stated that it concurred with RTL’s opinion that a transition to DVB-T2, which in Germany would take place in 2016 at the earliest, would not make sense in the country given that consumers would have to purchase new reception devices at a time when they would be obtaining HD quality programming over the Internet.
MABB then pointed out that although ARD as a public broadcaster had committed to DVB-T2 it was already streaming its full 24-hour channels via the Internet at a quality sufficient for large TV screens for a fast growing number of subscribers with sufficiently fast broadband connections.
This outburst was followed in March 2013 by Ulrich Reimers, an expert in DVB technology at the German Technical University Braunschweig, arguing that commercial broadcasters’ rejection of digital terrestrial in parts of Germany could trigger a nationwide withdrawal from DTT services altogether. The suggestion seemed to be that DTT could fall victim to Germany’s splintered TV market riven by sharp regional differences.
He argued it was unlikely Germany would adopt DVB-T2 for broadcasting in its present form. But far from writing off DVB-T2, Reimers suggested it would find life in Germany in mobile broadcasting, where a stripped down version called DVB-T2 Lite has been gaining favor, capable of being optimized both for indoor coverage and reception by moving devices in cars or trains.
He pointed out that there are already over one million car-based TV reception systems in Germany, and six million PCs with DVB-T equipment. He suggested that neither unicast LTE nor current mobile broadcast standards on the table would be widely used for mobile TV by cellular operators, partly because of business factors such as cost of backhaul bandwidth. He suggested that overlaying DVB-T2 on the existing LTE infrastructure could provide a strong platform for lucrative mobile TV services.
This would be ironic given the great efforts being made by the European Broadcasting Union in particular to preserve their spectrum for DVB-T2 from marauding cellular operators demanding it for LTE. In Germany it looks like the broadcasters instead may just give the spectrum away with DVB-T2 as well.
In Austria DTT penetration is almost as low, at around 6%, but it enjoys stronger backing, with support for encrypted distribution, welcomed by broadcasters such as RTL because they can then control access to its channels via specific set top boxes, although it also adds to the cost. Significantly RTL, despite giving up on DTT in Germany, remains committed to it in Austria because it believes there is stronger governmental and regulatory backing.
Meanwhile over in Italy, one of the most highly penetrated DTT markets of all with 21 million of the country’s homes ‘ 85% of the total – having at least one DTT receiver, political chaos seems to have spilled over into spectrum auctions and decisions over whether to move down to 600 MHz. Amid the confusion neighboring Malta and Croatia last year submitted formal protests to Italy’s Communications Authority (AgCom) over the framework of the ongoing public consultation on the regulations for the planned DTT frequency auction. This led to suspension of the so called ‘beauty contest’ in which broadcasters Rai, Mediaset and Telecom Italia were bidding to increase their transmission and channels on the DTT platform. In the end Italy’s Communications Authority (AgCom) announced that it was dropping some frequencies from the DTT auction to resolve the conflict with Malta and Croatia, as well as with France. Italy has set 2015 as the year that DTT gives up the 700 MHz band to mobile services.
Of all the major countries, Spain has been lagging furthest behind in its spectrum reshuffling. Its four nationwide single-frequency DTT networks have still been using the 800 MHz band that has been long surrendered in other countries. These services will to be moved to other frequencies, with around 1.4 million antennas needing to be adapted. Needless to say talk of a further move to 600 MHz in Spain is very premature.