Jerry Brito

UK: May we interest you in some spectrum?

While in this country we’re debating whether the government should hand over to a single entrepreneur 30 of the 36 MHz of prime radio spectrum slated for auction after the digital TV transition, in the UK they’re doing things a little different. According to GigaOm:

British carriers might have spent over 20 billion pounds on 3G wireless auctions several years ago, but they will soon get a chance to spend even more for “the UK’s largest single release of radio spectrum”, says British regulator Ofcom. This morning Ofcom outlined a plan for wireless auctions, which will be technology agnostic, but could include spectrum for WiMAX, mobile TV, mobile broadcast and even 3G. Ofcom is asking for a consultation period until March 2007. Ofcom says the three bands that will be available are: 2010-2025 MHz, 2290-2300 MHz and 2500-2690 MHz, and a total of 215 MHz will be on the market. There will be two initial auctions which will be part of a bigger plan to sell off up to 400 MHz over the following years.

You heard right, 400 Mhz of technology agnostic spectrum. I invite my friends concerned about net neutrality to look at this. We all would like to see new competition in broadband, and spectrum reform seems to me to be the first obvious step in that direction.

December 12, 2006 | Comments |

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    Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of European regulators.

    There is technology agnostic spectrum and there is technology agnostic spectrum. The European 3G band was billed as "technology agnostic," but it turned out there was a catch: bidders were required to select their technology in advance. This regulatory sleight-of-hand assured that bidders would choose the only technology perceived as safe.

    The plan to auction hundreds of MHz is what's most interesting. Previous auctions on both sides of the Atlantic were arguably designed to maximize revenue by combining auctions with artificially-created shortages. Auctioning hundreds of MHz should help achieve the original auction goal: distributing spectrum in a fair and market-driven manner.

    However, it will be interesting to see how the UK 3G operators react. They may fight this. They paid hefty prices for relatively narrow slices of 2 GHz spectrum and now Ofcom comes along with what may look like, in comparison, spectrum dumping. The UK's 3G operators may be understandably angry if they find themselves competing against operators who paid considerably less for considerably more bandwidth in adjacent spectrum.

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