UHF2 realignment study - Ofcom Licensing

egulatory uncertainty, which has left businesses in uncertainty for of the past few years. It is
likely that systems will continue to be replaced and maintained and over a number of years,
with some services over-time moving out of the band. For those services that are in the
South East it is likely that increased interference will either force a move outside of the band
or indeed, force an alignment of ‘pockets’ of spectrum. Ofcom and the E&PSS spectrum
manager, through the market mechanisms such as trading and liberalisation, could facilitate
alignment. However, the ‘ripple effect’ and guard bands required to manage interference
would need to be managed, leading to difficulties in assigning spectrum.
i. Guard Bands when aligning spectrum
An important element of any partial band alignment or stepped full alignment is providing a
measure of protection to protect each service where there is aligned and unaligned
spectrum. This protection would in effect require allocating a guard band of the size of a
channel and also geographical separation in the order of kilometres between adjacent
channel users without additional site engineering being needed. Therefore, as alignment
takes place on particular channels a ‘ripple effect’ occurs where assignments need to have a
geographical separation. If alignment were to begin on the south coast, the effect of this
would be larger geographical separations within the UK, creating a ‘ripple effect’ of
interference. Managing interference for assignments would be complex to manage as the
interference would have an effect on adjacent assignments. Therefore, co-ordinating and
managing such an exercise is extremely labour intensive when having to consider a total of
17,000 assignments in the bands, can lead to a question of practicality.
9.2.5 If direct regulatory intervention was the way forward in the band, what would be the
main challenges?
It is likely that stakeholders would prevent any attempt of direct regulatory intervention
without any assurances on costs and mitigating risks. Managing the costs and practical
implementation of a managed partial or full alignment project would be complex due to a lack
of resources such as skilled labour and high costs, which as identified in this report return no
net benefit.
It is our opinion that the only possible practical method of aligning spectrum in a co-ordinated
and efficient manner would be to use an ‘Overlay auction’, which is described in more detail
below. This method would be in our opinion the most appropriate method to introduce future
wideband services within the UHF2 band.
i. Regulatory Intervention in a fragmented band
One option for re-configuration of the UHF2 band is an ‘overlay licence’ or ‘overlay auction’,
which has been used successfully in other countries. There are two main circumstances in
which a spectrum band may need to be cleared of existing users:
240689 - 450-470 Study Final Print
Version (Dec08).doc
when a band is fragmented;
Page 101
abc