A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Digital Transition approach being followed in the UK and in the US. In summary, it was that neither the UK or the US had the right approach as the US were doing it too quickly and the UK too slow. Since then a number of events have happened that continue the story of the transitions in both countries.
In the US, the new President quickly raised the idea that the transition is going badly and that they need to delay until June 12, to allow more preparations (primarily to persuade the viewers to actually get the digital tuners and to also get more tuners into the stores). In my blog post I stated that they should continue the transition no matter how painful, as to change now would cause even more disruption. What has happened since is that these attempts have failed to pass through both houses, but that new approaches are being followed that should eventually result in delay. To be honest, when the new date comes around the same impact will happen as people are not want to listen unless there is something really to their advantage in the conversation. In the UK, the advantage is more TV channels – in the US there is no advantage until the transmission is off and the viewer HAS to get the box and aerial sorted out.
In the UK, the Digital Britain report has been published which says a lot of things but the most important for Digital Transition is the statement about how broadband universal access has been delayed because the above 800MHz frequencies are not yet available and will not be available until 2012. This spectrum is currently inhabited by UHF analogue TV services, but the British government and Ofcom want to liberate it for use by 3G/4G wireless services – after all these frequencies are the ones that give range and coverage for data services. In fact, a large part of the universal coverage commitment looks to be provided by wireless rather than by any other method – it is just too expensive to cable/fibre connect every remote area of Britain.
So two separate issues – one caused by a transition that is too quick that they want to slow down and the other caused by a transition that is too slow that they would have liked to speed up but seem committed to.
These are important lessons for other countries undertaking the transition in the near future, your plan has to be somewhere in the middle of these two approaches so that you have an orderly and effective transition and also that you gain from the liberated spectrum, whether for data, voice, or increased capacity of video services.
