Qualcomm's UK spectrum is too big for pocket TV

Qualcomm has just paid Ofcom £8.3m for a 40MHz-wide chunk of the "L-band".

The licence covers the whole country, has no termination date and has no restrictions or obligations as to technology or rollout. The company can do pretty well what it likes, where it likes, when it likes. But Qualcomm hasn't said much about its motives. "Acquiring this spectrum will enable us to develop, test and explore a variety of innovative wireless services and technologies that will benefit European consumers and the wireless industry as a whole," states the press release. It's up to us to try and work out Qualcomm's plan.

The L-band is a rather peculiar beast. Until the 1970s, technology capable of using it was too expensive for consumers, so it bears the legacy of plenty of interesting professional and esoteric uses. Roughly bracketed at either end by the mobile phone bands at 900MHz and 1800MHz, it contains a mixed bag of military and civil services, including radio amateurs bouncing signals off the moon from Stockton-on-Tees. GPS and Galileo live there, as does digital audio broadcasting, both terrestrial and satellite, as well as space-based ground-measuring radar, astronomy and just about anything else you can think of.

These days, it's the natural beneficiary of all the work that's been done in making cheap and effective mobile-phone technology. With a wavelength of around 20cm, it's easy to make portable devices that transmit and receive efficiently, and the electronics required are available off the shelf for a matter of pennies. It gets through walls better than Wi-Fi, it isn't attenuated that badly by the atmosphere, so you can get decent coverage from well-sited base stations, and, with 40MHz to play with, Qualcomm can easily deliver a couple of hundred megabits per second over whatever it is that it chooses to do.

In this case, it's safe to take Qualcomm at its word: it's got some new ideas and it wants to find out whether they work. With the spectrum auction win, it's effectively bought one of the world's biggest open-air radio-frequency laboratories — at an absolute knock-down price. The UK contains just about every sort of radio environment, from dense masses of urban canyons — the great phrase that radio engineers use to describe skyscraper-studded financial districts — to the bleakest of rural vastnesses, via the prairies of suburbia. Plus, just as importantly, these physical environments are matched by just as rich a mix of economic environments. The L-band has the attributes of just about any other band that might be used to deliver terrestrial wireless services, which means that any work Qualcomm does will be useful, no matter how or where the eventual commercialisation happens. It's the perfect petri dish in which to grow novel concepts.

This seems like a much better use of the band than the alternatives. One of these, detailed by Ovum, is that Qualcomm would roll out an L-band mobile-TV service based on its MediaFLO technology, with the intention of developing the handset, operator and content sides in preparation for the availability of better spectrum come the analogue switch-off in 2012. The trouble with this idea is the huge investment by partners in something with no very good chance of turning a buck in its own right — and, in the West at least, mobile TV is looking like a dangerous gamble.

Given the huge and increasing pressures on broadcast TV from online services, putting a big bet on replicating it in handheld form with a launch date four or five years hence seems foolish at best (not that foolish bets are unknown in wireless). Plus, MediaFLO was concocted five years ago, before other people had tried and mostly failed to roll out mobile TV; the latest and biggest hopeful is AT&T, which last week launched its MediaFLO service in the US. The success or failure of that will have a much bigger impact on the popularity of the technology than anything on the UK L-band. By now, MediaFLO — the FLO stands for "forward link only"; it's a one-way street — seems a bad match for a Web 2.0 world.

It's much more interesting to think about what could be done differently...