Guidelines

The digital dividend

Some of the current digital coverage constraints caused by the need to share spectrum between analogue and digital services will, however, disappear over the next few years as the analogue services are switched off. The UK government has recognised that the uses of spectrum for services such as mobile communications and broadcasting have a significant effect on the economy, and that spectrum is also essential to numerous public services, including defence, the emergency services, and transport. The demand for spectrum is growing fast, reflecting rapid innovation in wireless technologies and applications of many different kinds, and the rising importance of the spectrum means that the way that it is managed is a vital issue for advanced economies around the world.

It is therefore important to ensure that the use of spectrum brings as many benefits as possible to the UK’s citizens and consumers, so the UK government has decided to re-organise and re-allocate the UHF frequency spectrum. By switching off the analogue TV transmissions in a phased manner in different regions of the UK, spectrum space will be created not only sufficient to provide digital TV coverage to equal the 98.5% that the analogue services currently provide, plus some extra TV capacity, which may be used to provide High Definition TV services, but the reorganisation will also free a considerable amount of spectrum that can be sold-off to other potential users to provide other services. The benefits of this exercise (in cash terms as well as in efficiency) are often referred to as ‘the digital dividend’.

Digital switchover

A carefully planned ‘digital switchover’ plan began in 2007 and is being implemented region by region, switching off analogue transmissions in an area and immediately replacing them with digital transmissions providing a much greater choice of programme services. By 2012 the digital switchover will be complete and there will be no more analogue TV services in the UK. Most European countries are following a similar pattern.

Terrestrial transmitters in the Channel Islands will also be switching over to fully digital TV and this is currently scheduled for 2013, subject to negotiations with France.

For further information on the digital switchover see RNIB Media & Culture.

Digital television standards

All digital transmissions, satellite, cable, and terrestrial, use a set of transmission and modulation standards determined by the Digital Video Broadcasting project (DVB), which works to develop, set and promote technical guidelines, standards and specifications to benefit and advance digital media markets. The technical standards are different for the three ‘platforms’ – satellite, cable, and terrestrial, as each requires different technologies to optimise transmission and reception.

Terrestrial receivers and set top boxes throughout Europe use the DVB-T transmission standards, but there are many variations in the fine detail of how the standards are used in each country, to allow for differences in coverage, numbers of channels to be transmitted, and ruggedness of reception, so that although the basic chipset and electronic technologies used in DTT receivers throughout Europe are the same, it is unlikely that a DTT receiver bought in one country will work in another without some modifications, and such modifications are likely to be difficult for a viewer to achieve.

 

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