Television must give up frequencies to telecom
As previously announced, the 165 countries present at the conference in Geneva's Radio International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has agreed to allocate to telecommunication carriers much of the frequency bands currently used for broadcast television.
Specifically, the conference allows countries that wish to assign to the mobile part of frequencies called "gold" (800 to 900 MHz). These frequencies are valuable because the waves will propagate better. Consequently, there is less need for issuers and high frequencies. And therefore the construction of a network is less expensive. In France, mobile operators have snatched the first gold frequencies auctioned by the state in late 2011.
Growing needs
However, the Geneva conference gave each country free to make or not the transfer frequency. François Rancy, office director of the ITU Radio, said that "television can make the spectrum" on mobile "as it goes digital."
African countries or the Middle East want to do it quickly because they rely more on telecommunications than on broadcasting. For France, Eric Besson, Minister of Industry, recently reassured the audiovisual world by telling the BBC that no change of use of the band 694-790 MHz was planned at this time. "The DTT channels should continue to develop on frequencies that have been assigned or allocated to them by the end of 2012," he had specified.
This process is not completed, said François Rancy. In 2015, during the next radiocommunication conference, countries will decide whether it is possible to assign even more frequency bands to mobile "to meet" its growing needs, smartphones with smartphones that "increasing traffic "and therefore require" much more frequency "to convey information.
Mobile broadband is widespread in Western countries, but it is becoming increasingly the technology of choice for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, where fixed telecommunications infrastructure are often incomplete and costly to install .
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