The digital dividend from the DTV transition won’t narrow the dig...
The digital dividend from the DTV transition won’t narrow the digital gap, participants said Friday at a conference organized by the Alcatel Lucent Foundation in Stuttgart. The discussion on how to allocate freed spectrum still looms, said Alexander Rossnagel,…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
director at the Institute of European Media Law (EMR). Despite the dividend, spectrum is a “scarce resource,” thanks to so many entities being interested in it, said Rossnagel. A political argument for reallocation to mobile operators had been that they would use the spectrum also to offer broadband access in rural areas. “No mobile operator had said, give us 72 MHz and we will solve broadband connection in rural areas,” said Uwe Loewenstein, manager-spectrum technology for Telefonica 02 Europe. Loewenstein cited mobile operators’ calculations that they will need far more spectrum in coming years, perhaps 600 to 1100 MHz. Mobile operators in Germany will start DVB-T mobile broadcasting for the European Soccer Championship, but the list of services to be offered over the new frequencies remains an open question because 4G services are still under development.