The French government has issued a policy document this week with 154 proposals, which will eliminate the digital divide, underwrite the launch of services using alternative broadband technologies including satellite, WiMAX and digital cable, set the time frame for the next two major spectrum auctions for 2.1GHz and 2.6GHz, with provisions for ‘open networks’, and delivered a promise to harness the gaps in digital TV spectrum, so called white space spectrum.
Conversations about spectrum across the breadth of Europe over the last three years have all taken one extreme or the other ‘ either the accepte wisdom is that TV spectrum freed up by the digital switchover should go back to TV to bring us HD, or that it should be auctioned to the highest bidder, which for the most part is expected to be 3G/4G mobile broadband.
The French have been one country where most of the rhetoric has been behind grandfathering enough spectrum to broadcasters that they would be able to move lock, stock and barrel to HD. While the UK has taken the opposite tack that one new multiplex, using DVB-T2 would be set aside for HD, and all the other channels would be further compressed to fit in the remaining multiplexes. And that ALL spare spectrum would end up being auctioned. The difference is mostly in how they arrive at the same place, which service, broadcasting or cellular, makes way for the other.
Because in the end these two positions, often characterized as radically different, have turned out to be not so far apart with France this week saying that it will auction off some 72 MHz of UHF spectrum.
The aim is to use it specifically to offer wireless broadband and France is now saying that it will adhere largely to the plan identified by the 2007 World Radiocommunication Conference which was for communications services to get the spectrum between 790MHz and 862MHz.
Technically the regulator has gone further and has allocated it to ‘electronic communications services’ to reduce the ‘digital divide” rather than just putting it up for a straight auction. It has accompanied this with a major paper, called the ‘France num’rique 2012’ plan which puts forward 154 targets which France hopes to achieve in the run up to 2012 and the digital switchover.
The plan includes a major call to extend the reach of urban DSL using ‘alternate’ technologies which include satellite, WiMAX and wireless so that a broadband service is in reach of every French home by 2010, at a tariff of no more than €35 a month, access equipment included. One action is simply to better train installers of alternative Internet access so that the requisite skills are available for alternative suppliers.
The entire plan kicks off with a decree requiring operators to publish maps of their reach by the end of 2008 to the state and local authorities. Part of this is to hold them to promises, but also to decide where local authority money is needed to complete the country wide broadband reach, with local authorities acting as minority investors in open networks in a kind of public private partnership approach.
But not content to leave the call for eliminating the digital divide there, the paper goes on to make incursions into cellular regulation, saying that it will reduce European number portability, making it easier to take your number anywhere; establish a wholesale market for handsets, to bring more device competition to bear; and it wants to put demands for open networks into the auctioning process, as the US did with one of its 700 MHz segments.
There will be a call for applications for the 2.1 GHz band based on promoting competition and ensuring best coverage. The conditions for the 2.6 GHz band auction will be defined in 2009 and will include considerations of tariff and technologies, the absence of exclusivity, rights of priority, enabling MVNOs and promoting innovation.
The paper also said that the white spaces between the digital TV spectrum would definitely be used and a paper from the CSA and Arcep regulators would be issued by January 2009 on how best to go about this
There will be enough spectrum left for TV to enable 11 digital terrestrial multiplexes covering approximately 95% of the French population and 2 mobile TV multiplexes with a coverage of 80% of the population. The 11 DTT multiplexes will enable a widespread move to HDTV with a total of 40 HD channels, the paper said.
The French Secretary of State for the Development of Digital Economy, Eric Besson announced all these details as a policy document which he said would restore growth and modernize France and put it in the lead in Europe in terms of the digital economy.