Vodafone splashes €2 BEEELLLION to kick German TV sideways Germany's electricity, gas, telecoms, post and railway regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, has raised €5.08bn in its latest spectrum auction - including flogging the 700MHz frequencies currently in use by TV channels. The biggest purchaser was Vodafone, which splurged €2.1bn, with the auction going through 181 rounds and …
Haven't the governments shot themselves in the foot here? If they restricted the amount of bandwidth for sale (leasehold), they would limit the supply and thus push up prices. As it stands they're flooding the market with 4G frequencies. No wonder they aren't reaching the lofty heights of the 2000-era auctions.
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Perhaps not so much of an issue for the UK, being an island, but when flogging off spectrum like this, how does the government / operators ensure there is no bleed beyond the borders of the country where the spectrum has been sold - or is it simply a case of don't expect a signal near a border?
The spectrum won't be usable for a few more years near the border. This explains why this part of the spectrum was not the most desirable.
The public outcry for making millions of DVB-T receivers useless (including the ones bought today) is yet to come. I'm not sure they will be able to use the spectrum so soon.
How the spectrum is used close to a other country is based on the border agreement. What they normally do is to limit the usage to 1800Mhz / 2600Mhz so it doesn't leak too far into nearby country. As it stands Germany is moving to DVB-T2 from mid-2016 and finishing the move in 2019.
More details on that can be found here.
www.ndr.de/der_ndr/technik/FAQ-DVB-T2,faqdvbtzwei100.html
The change on the 700Mhz block from TV to LTE service is going to take place from November 2015 (world wide I think). Once some meeting at ITU is finished.
"I think it's a Hurricane though."
Nah. That's a Spitfire, almost certainly one with a Griffon engine instead of a Merlin. The canopy and the four- or five-blade prop say late-marque Spit or perhaps a Spiteful or a Seafang. Probably a a later Spit, though, very few Spitefuls or Seafangs were built and I don't think that any survive. It's definitely not a Hurri. No standard production Hurri had a canopy like that one, and I'm pretty sure that no Hurri had a four-blade prop, either.
All reports of the demise of DVB-T in Germany are exaggerated. The number of channels certainly doesn't compare well to the UK, and satellite is more entrenched, but there are still a sizeable number of households for whom DVB-T is the only option. This is one of the reasons why RTL isn't abandoning ship as early as previously announced.
Mind you, given the generally awful quality of programming, the shift to online only is going pretty fast.
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