back to article Ofcom needs you ... to help spend £180m on purifying telly

Ofcom is consulting on the best way to avoid 4G telephony knocking out Freeview, but the regulator seems to be having a hard time putting government plans into words. Yesterday the Ministry of Fun announced that bidders for digital dividend spectrum would have to shell out £180m for mitigation to avoid LTE services knocking …

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  1. MJI Silver badge

    Various ways

    There are the large 4G jamming stations at Sutton, Crystal Palace and Emley.

    Local ones - axe through power supplies - lots of ways to protect TV coverage.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      axe through power supplies

      Nah, too obvious.

      Pin through the co-ax, snipped off flush with the outer sheath. Highly effective, and next to impossible to find.

      1. MJI Silver badge

        Re: axe through power supplies

        Thanks

        So if one starts to ruin my TV reception I know how to repair it.

        Or just turn up Sutton

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Various ways

      Easiest Way:

      Prohibit the construction of 4G basestations in any area not FULLY covered by an effective 20+Mbit/s fibre (to the home or to the cabinet) broadband service.

      [If 20Mbit/s won't manage 4 different channels in parallel, then increase the numbers accordingly].

      4G operators will have to throw money at BT to sort out the local infrastructure - which can only be a good thing for all of us.

      Oh yes, 4G operators fund, in perpetuity, bandwidth costs of all material streamed/downloaded from legitimate brodcasters' sources.

      Is 4G now too expensive to be worth bothering with? Yes? Good!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's all a plot

    .. to make us all look on broadcast telly as quaint and unreliable, so that we all move our viewing on-line - much easier for the beeb to collect its fee. Or is it simply driven by the desire to make us buy more stuff to maintain the basic level of service that we've been used to? Or are they just incompetent twats?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's all a plot

      Move our viewing online?

      You must be one of those city-dwelling types. Those of us out in the sticks are too far for fast broadband and too sparsely populated for 3G coverage.

      But you're probably right about them wanting to make us buy stuff and being incompetent. There's a pretty high likelihood for that with most projects.

  3. Da Weezil
    Mushroom

    Polluter Pays

    IPTV will never be workable while BTw hold the reigns to such large areas of the country where we regularly see sub 1 meg speeds on a line capable of 6 megs (forget fibre or 24 meg WBC my 10k line exchange is still light years away from that it seems)

    Polluter pays surely? And that means EVERYONE - not just low income groups... if your new super whizz bang network interferes with an existing service which the public already have to have a licence to receive - and one that has just seen a hugely wasteful shift to digital then the incoming service operators should have to pay for ALL of the problems they create for anyone with a licence no matter how many receivers they have installed and no matter what the household income.

    We were ripped off for enough with digital!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Polluter Pays

      It's not just me then? It seems obvious that if there is unacceptable interference then their operation should be shut down indefinitely until they can work out a solution. That should concentrate a few minds. I would have thought that was Ofcom's job. And since when did the elderly and disabled have different electromagnetic properties from everybody else?

      1. mfraz
        FAIL

        Re: Re: Polluter Pays

        Ofcom should never have decided to sell of the spectrum to mobile phone companies, plus this whole digital TV and radio thing is becoming a pain in the behind. How long before we all have to buy a new receiver/aerial to cope with the next change?

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Trollface

    What is this "TV" people speak of?

    Isn't that some old technology from before the wars? With Tony Blair and stuff?

    1. Matthew 3

      Re: What is this "TV" people speak of?

      Tony Blair was 'before the wars'?

      Exactly which wars do you have in mind here?

  5. Jim 59

    TV

    In some ways it is unfortunate that we are shoving unidirectional broadcast traffic onto a voice-optimized packet switched network. You end up with something not very goot at either and very overburdened.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ofcom are a joke

    All you had to do was look at the response to the interference powerline adaptors cause.

    Same in this instance - total waste of space and money.

  7. Andrew Jones 2
    FAIL

    As I have wrote elsewhere - if filters don't fix the problem in our area - they really need not think that sticking up a freesat dish and giving us a box is going to ease our problems because it won't. We want access to the same channels we can already receive on Freeview thank you very much. Additionally - our 6 year old gracefully ageing Humax PVR9200T will quite happily record 2 channels and let us watch a third provided it is a channel from one of the 2 multiplexes the tuners are recording from. Giving us a different service - is not the same - we lose a lot of functionality with Sky / Freesat.

  8. itzman
    Boffin

    I dont understand....this bit

    "It's not the weakness of the Freeview signal which is the issue, but rather that when combined with the interfering LTE transmission the signals can't be deciphered by the Freeview box, so fitting a filter within the home will be ineffective once the combination has been amplified at the rooftop."

    Surely fitting a filter before the amplifier will sort the problem out?

  9. Colin Millar

    Don't they ever learn

    "Should the £180m prove insufficient to the task then the government will top it up, by as much as is needed "

    They really need to stop doing stuff like this - when companies see a blank check they tend to milk it for all that they can - is it only Whitehall types that fail to recognise this simplest of all business facts.

    Risk assessment with a proper commercial transfer of rights and risks - "could cost a bit to do the mitigation maybe we better assess the mitigation as accurately as possible and price this properly"

    Risk assessmennt under Ofcoms plan - "woohoo! We have absolute knowledge of the maximum amount this can cost us no matter what the real size of the problem - full steam ahead and never mind the seahorses - government pays if it all goes bad - now think of a big number and then double it"

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