Digital takes up less bandwidth per channel than FM. This allows the government to resell the frequency allocations. This is what happened with analog broadcast TV in the US.
> Digital takes up less bandwidth per channel than FM. This allows the government to resell the frequency allocations. This is what happened with analog broadcast TV in the US.
I'd be all for it if it meant more of the spectrum went for unlicensed use like 2.4GHz or 5GHz. Anyone know what happened to the white space thing? Sounds like a really good thing.
The technology isn't there yet (or more to the point, the technology is burdened by unreasonable regulatory requirements). The government has been pretty insistent that white space devices protect all incumbents on existing channels, but that's very hard to do. Imagine, for example, that you've got a TV receiver between you and the TV tower. You might be too far away to hear the TV tower, but the receiver might be in range. If you decide that frequency is empty, your transmission might interference with the receiver's. (And TV receivers are pretty dumb devices that aren't very resistant to interference.)
For white space to work well, you've got to kick off the incumbents and force all devices to follow certain very basic rules. (Think the rules you have to follow to drive on the road.) See: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=5C9.... This is a political impossibility.
In the U.S., the switch freed up frequencies that were used for cellular LTE coverage.
Right now, the American TV stations are going through a second frequency shift (called a re-pack). Everyone's being shoved into a smaller chunk of the spectrum, made possible by the transition to digital.
Some stations are sharing channels. Others are being paid by the federal government to go off the air entirely. The resulting frequencies will be auctioned off to the wireless carriers for 5G data.
Re-packing has happened before, even in analog days. When I was a kid, analog TV sets had channels up to 74. Then channels 70-74 were reassigned, my guess is around the early 80's.
And if you go way way back, there used to be a channel one in the United States, but it got reassigned, too. These things happen.
> In the U.S., the switch freed up frequencies that were used for cellular LTE coverage.
My country (Bosnia & Herzegovina) still hasn't introduced LTE because we still didn't go through the entire process of switching to digital television.
In the local media, that means we're "the only ones in Europe", but I can't find an external source to confirm that.
You don't have to free up digital TV frequencies to introduce LTE. Many European/Asian countries launched LTE on 2600 MHz before their digital switchovers were completed, and others have recycled GSM/UMTS frequencies, reducing the capacity/coverage of the legacy networks.
I am most certainly aware of that, but that's the official reason according to the government, that's the reason served in the media, and finally, that's the reason mobile providers were given for not being able to serve LTE signal (two out of three most popular mobile providers did the tests in most populous cities half a decade ago).
Tv uses a _lot_ more bandwidth than radio. The analogue tv spectrum gets repurposed for 3g/4g etc, but the frequency of FM radio doesn't provide remotely enough capacity to be able to justify it for this reason (though there are other reasons, such as being able to have to have overlapping transmission towers)
