Broadcast television spectrum incentive auctions in the u.s.: trends, challenges, and opportunities

Abstract

Caldwell, MW. (2015). Broadcast television spectrum incentive auctions in the U.S.: trends, challenges, and opportunities. IEEE Communications Magazine. 53 (7) ABSTRACTThis paper presents an overview of the upcoming television broadcast spectrum incentive auction in the U.S., which will be the first ever attempted worldwide, and discusses the main business, regulatory and technical challenges of a successful incentive auction. The process combines two separate but linked auctions: a reverse auction, which will identify the prices at which broadcasters are willing to relinquish their spectrum; and a forward auction, which will determine the price mobile network operators are willing to pay to acquire the new frequencies. The two auctions will determine the buyers and sellers and also the amount of spectrum to be cleared in the 600 MHz band after reorganizing the television stations that remain on air. This process is known as repacking and will create contiguous blocks of cleared spectrum at the high frequency side of the UHF band for mobile use. The paper also reviews the potential plans for the 600 MHz band and discusses the opportunities that could bring about the new digital terrestrial television standard known as "ATSC 3.0".

MIMO for ATSC 3.0

“…Considering the relevance of maximizing the broadcast spectrum efficiency due to the rapidly growing demand for wireless broadband services [12], MIMO is the most convincing technology that brings huge benefit in this aspect. Furthermore, in the U.S. MIMO can actually provide a larger comparative gain because the regulation allows to increase the total transmit power by transmitting the nominal transmit power in each polarization.…”

Interference Analysis Between Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and 4G LTE Mobile Networks in the Digital Dividend Bands

“…In Europe, some countries such as Finland, Germany, Sweden and UK have already announced their intentions to allocate the 700 MHz band to mobile services by performing a second digital dividend (DD2), some countries as early as 2017 [2], and it is expected that an harmonized DD2 will take place in Europe around the horizon 2020 [3]. On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. is taking a further step by considering the 600 MHz band as a DD2 [4]. An impending problem when deploying mobile networks in the digital dividend bands is that interferences may appear in the adjacent radio frequency (RF) channels used for DTT.…”

Coexistence of DTT and Mobile Broadband: A Survey and Guidelines for Field Measurements

“…This chapter has considered the potential developments in DTT in Europe, which belongs to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Region 1. The current situation and potential developments in different ITU regions and countries are different from Europe, and, for example, in the United States (which belongs to ITU Region 2) DD1 was the 700 MHz band (698-806 MHz) and DD2 is made through a broadcast incentive auction in the 600 MHz band [99]. The auction was formally closed in April 2017.…”