Canberra's looming spectrum challenge
The shutdown of analogue TV across Australia was expected to deliver a lucrative windfall to the federal government, unfortunately, the winner of the election next month now faces the prospect of an unseemly fight with the police and other emergency services over the allocation of unsold radio frequencies.
Earlier this year the ‘digital dividend’ auction was expected to net Treasury $3 billion as the valuable frequencies became available for mobile phone operators, despite warnings that the asking prices were too high and the UK experience where bidding fell thirty per cent short of the expected £3.5 billion government bonanza.
Unfortunately for the government and the Treasury bean counters, those warnings proved correct with a third of the spectrum – worth an estimated $900 million – remaining unsold.
That unsold spectrum is now being hotly contested over as emergency services stake a claim to the unallocated frequencies for their communications requirements.
At the heart of the fight is the attraction of lower frequency communications that are more reliable over longer distances than radio signals at higher ranges. This was a point made by Telstra in the early marketing its NextG network – which uses the 850MHz range – which featured the telco showing off how their signals could get to places where competitors couldn’t.
These attributes make the 700MHz range particularly attractive to emergency services for their broadcast requirements and their claim to those frequencies has been helped by the US Federal Communications Commission allocating 20MHz of that spectrum for American emergency services.
In Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has allocated half that in the 700Mhz range along with space in other frequency ranges to give local emergency services a total of 85MHz of available broadcasting spectrum.
This mismatch between overseas and Australian allocations now raises concerns that state governments and public safety agencies will have to pay more for equipment specifically built for local requirements.
Another concern among emergency services is that some of that available bandwidth will be prone to interference from other users, as the Police Forces Association warned in a letter to then Attorney General Robert Maclennan in February last year.
“Technical experts from within our PFA members together with industry have advised that the lower portion of the 800 MHz band which ACMA is suggesting for public safety will not be effective due to the narrow 2 or 3 MHz guard band separating it from the Digital Dividend spectrum meaning it will be affected by interference,” wrote the association.
In that letter PFA also warned the 10MHz allocation would be inadequate to deal with day to day operations should a major incident such as a train crash or bushfire occur.
To the Federal Parliament’s Joint Committee on Law Enforcement inquiry into the spectrum allocations, the PFA’s submission warned something that many mobile phone users have been painfully aware of – that cellular phone networks become overwhelmed at peak usage times.
“Already if you look at the major events in any capital city in Australia, and I talk personally because I was the commander of the city in Sydney for five years, on New Year's Eve data systems collapse currently,” testified Robert Waites, consultant to the Police Federations of Australia. “They collapse because of congestion.”
Earlier this year, ACMA Chairman Chris Chapman writing on the IT News website rejected these claims asserting that the combination of allocations in various frequency ranges gave “a total solution that enables public service agencies to respond to emergencies and catastrophes”.
The Parliamentary Committee sided with the emergency services and in their report recommended that 20MHz of the contested bandwidth be allocated to public safety agencies.
For the government, such a move would further reduce the revenue expected from wireless spectrum sales. Recently Minister Albanese relented in a similar argument over railway frequencies and granted the Australasian Railway Association continued use of the 1800MHz spectrum they had taken over from One Tel in the early 2000s.
At the heart of the competing claims on bandwidth is the massive explosion of mobile data traffic as everyone from households to railways and emergency services connect more information hungry devices to the wireless networks.
Both government and opposition spokespersons were contacted for comment on their plans for managing this conundrum should they win the upcoming election but neither responded in time for publication.
The need to balance commercial interests, public safety and raise money in the face of these demands will be a challenge for whoever wins government on September 7.