170,000 London UK Homes to Help Test for 4G TV Interference Woes

at800.tv (DMSL), which was setup by UK mobile operators to support homes that could lose their digital terrestrial TV services due to interference from 4G (LTE) based Mobile Broadband services in the 800MHz spectrum band, has announced that its first major urban test will take place in South East London from 15th April 2013.

The groups first phase of testing, which focused on 22,000 homes in rural Cradley Heath and Rowley Regis (England’s West Midlands), found that just 15 households suffered reception problems and that was well below the official forecast of 120 (here). Practically all of the related issues were resolved by installing a simple filter to block the 4G signals from reaching TV tuners.

By comparison the second phase of testing will focus on 170,000 homes in urban areas, specifically parts of Greenwich, Lewisham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets in south east London. As before at800 is asking viewers in the area to report problems with their TV reception from Monday 15th April.

Simon Beresford-Wylie, CEO of at800, said:

“These larger tests are essential to help improve our forecast model and the way we’ll tackle potential issues caused by 4G at 800MHz. We are extremely grateful to viewers in south east London for their help with these important tests.”

Homes likely to be affected will be contacted directly through the post about the pilot, which is likely to exclude those that use cable or satellite TV for their primary viewing. Anybody that hasn’t received notice probably won’t be affected.

It’s hoped that the urban test will show a similarly low level of 4G related problems to the first pilot, which would mean that mobile operators will end up spending less of their joint £180m budget on mitigating TV interference.