Ofcom Finish Clearing 700MHz TV Band for UK Mobile Broadband

After several years of difficult work Ofcom has this week officially completed one of their “biggest” ever UK projects, which involved moving Digital Terrestrial TV (Freeview) channels out of the 700MHz spectrum band to free up those airwaves for use by 4G and 5G based mobile technology in 2021.

Lower frequencies like this (in the context of mobile bands) are ideal for delivering wide geographic coverage as they travel further and penetrate better into buildings (complemented by the 800MHz and 900MHz bands), but on the flip side there’s less spectrum frequency to go around and that means slower data speeds. Mobile operators can mitigate some of that by using Carrier Aggregation (CA) to combine several bands.

Clearing the 700MHz band for mobile meant many TV transmitters (masts) needed to change the frequency they used (some channels were moved into the 600MHz band) and planning all this was a complex job. All the new frequencies needed to coexist without interference and Ofcom also needed to negotiate agreements with other countries to make sure the UK’s spectrum use didn’t interfere with theirs.

In some cases Ofcom – working alongside DCMS, Arqiva, Digital UK and Freeview – even had to replace the antenna on some masts, which was quite a big job in itself and required skilled helicopter pilots (note: the embedded Vimeo video below always asks for VR permissions, so just block that request if it pops-up in your browser as it’s irrelevant).

When the TV transmitters changed frequencies, this meant millions of Freeview TV viewers had to retune their televisions to pick up the new frequencies (warnings about this were displayed ahead of time), which is a process that most people should be familiar with due to general changes in the channel line-up that occur all the time.

Ofcom Statement

One of the priorities for this project was to cause as little impact as possible on people’s TV viewing. If a retune didn’t work for viewer and they could no longer receive TV, a support phone line, website and online videos were available for people who had difficulties. In many cases in-home support was offered to viewers who had more challenging retune problems. Some viewers needed to replace their aerials – but this was a very small number of cases.

Making sure people still had access to their Freeview TV services was one of the reasons the project took so long. We staggered the work to minimise the disruption and avoid key events, like major sporting occasions.

As well as TV viewers, users of wireless microphones in the theatre and TV production industries also had to change their equipment to operate in new spectrum bands as a result of 700 MHz clearance.

All the attention will now switch to next year’s auction, which is due to take its first bids in January. Despite this a question mark remains over whether or not the auction will go ahead, not least since O2, Vodafone and Three UK have all criticised the approach and called for a fairer distribution of spectrum (i.e. one that saves them money and avoids squabbling over allocations in the final assignment stage).

Spectrum ownership is the lifeblood of the industry and thus any auction of new bands tends to always attract competitive disputes between operators and the regulator, which has a long history of creating delays.

We should add that the 700MHz band was originally due to attach a coverage obligation, but was scrapped as part of the £1bn industry led Shared Rural Network (SRN) agreement. The SNR requires the targeted sharing of existing masts and new masts in poorly served areas, which aims to extend UK geographic 4G coverage to 95% by the end of 2025 (5G will also play a role).