EU May Push for Competitive Spectrum Trading

anaesthetica writes "The Financial Times is reporting that Viviane Reding, the EU media commissioner, wants to spur a pan-European market through which companies could buy and sell cross-border access to the European spectrum regime, including frequencies used by TV, radio, mobile telephone and broadband services. Large European media companies are skeptical about the spectrum trading plan, saying both that there is no logic behind a pan-European telecom model, and that such a plan could interfere with satellite radio. Ms. Reding believes that the change would spur harmonization of the fragmented European telecom band allocation. This change is set to coincide with the 2012 switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting, when a significant portion of the spectrum will be freed up."

Auction of 3G licenses in UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Just finished the chapter "The Men Who Knew the Value of Nothing" in Tim Harford's book "The Undercover Economist", before logging on to /.

The last online auction of 3G licenses fetched 22.5 billion Pounds against the expectations of 3 billion. The government never knows what the frequencies are worth to the telephone companies, so, let them fight it out in a transparent auction. Devide 22.5 billion pounds with UK's population. It was the biggest auction in history.

What the heck?

[rmm4pi8]

Why do you think that spectrum isn't scarce? Remember that higher frequencies are capable of transmitting more information per channel, but at the cost of shorter range. So there's no need to regulate something like wi-fi, which is high frequency and short range, but even VHF spectrum is pretty crowded with military and public safety users, in addition to FM for radio and TV, and lower parts of the spectrum are extremely valuable due to the ability to transmit long distances and the broad channels needed to get acceptable data throughput. It's true that some of this will be freed up as more services go digital and better yet TCP/IP, but mesh networking is not good for low-latency applications, and there's no indication that this one-time savings will keep us ahead of the increasing demand for bandwidth in the medium-term. So bandwidth is certainly scarce now, and likely will be so for at least the next 50 years, which is plenty long enough to plan public policy around.

Re:No-Brainer

[orzetto]

In the US, the bandwith works because it's standardized across the nation (hence you can go coast-to-coast on your cell phone on the same fricking network).

Have you ever been to the US with a mobile? There are multiple standards and a mobile that works in Chicago may not work in Austin, TX or Cincinnati, OH. At least that was my experience in 2004 and 2005 with a tri-band I bought in the EU, I am not sure of the technical details but I think the problem is that technologies (such as iDen [wikipedia.org], Digital AMPS [wikipedia.org], and IS-95 [wikipedia.org]) can differ across US states. In Europe it's pretty much all GSM/UMTS.

Having your cellphone work in England as well as Turkey should be a good boost for this plan.

They already do. My father's mobile worked fine in Turkey (both Instanbul and at a tourist resort on the south coast, probably not far from Antalya) already in 1997 when I did not have one myself yet. My Norwegian mobile has been tested to work fine in Italy, Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and pretty much everywhere I brought it, except parts of the US.

Re:Auction of 3G licenses in UK

[zippthorne]

Ok, well then how do you propose dividing up the spectrum so that everyone's happy then? If the government doesn't do it, what organization should.

here [google.com] is what the current utilization looks like.

And of course, dividing up the spectrum is more complicated than just giving everyone an appropriate sized piece of the pie. Some applications are more sensitive to their neighbors, or harmonics, or band-sharing or can't be moved for infrastrusture reasons. Would you shut down Arecibo to make your plan simpler? What about the Deep Space Network?

RF bandwidth is an extremely limited resource. Market solutions make sure there is no shortage, but the price is .. the price.

Re:Ignorance and false markets

[jagspecx]

I'm not qualified to comment on your first two points, but your third is just plain wrong. From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
Scarcity means not having sufficient resources to produce enough to fulfill unlimited subjective wants. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be attained at the same time, so that we must trade off one good against others.
If trading some goods for others isn't a market, I don't know what is...