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Executive summary

Digital switchover and impact on programme-making and special events

1.1 The Government has decided that analogue terrestrial television should cease in the UK by 2012. This will allow the expansion of digital terrestrial television (DTT) to cover as much of the country as analogue covers now. This programme of change—digital switchover (DSO)—will have three major consequences:

• there will be an expansion in the number and range of services available via terrestrial television across the UK;
• a large amount of spectrum—the digital dividend—will become available for new uses; and
• the pattern of interleaved spectrum—the frequencies used by terrestrial television and shared by low-power applications, including for programme-making and special events (PMSE)—will change.

1.2 PMSE is one of the key sectors using interleaved spectrum. It makes a major contribution to the UK’s social, cultural and economic well-being. It comprises a very wide variety of organisations and individuals using spectrum for an equally wide variety of uses. There are many thousands of business and professional users in broadcasting, entertainment and events and many more among charities and community organisations.

1.3 The purpose of this statement is to help PMSE users understand the pattern of interleaved spectrum after DSO and to describe how we will manage the process of migrating them to new frequencies in interleaved spectrum so that they neither cause interference to, nor suffer interference from, DTT and other uses. We are working on the basis that there should be broadly sufficient capacity in interleaved spectrum after DSO to accommodate existing PMSE use.

1.4 We will consult on the detailed design of the award of this spectrum as part of our Digital Dividend Review (DDR) during spring 2008.

The full document is available below

• Access to interleaved spectrum for programme-making and special events after digital switchover [pdf]
  Full Print Version
• PMSE: Future Spectrum Access - Identification of post-DSO digital interleaved spectrum which could be useable by PMSE applications and development of a PMSE user migration plan [pdf]
  A report prepared for Ofcom by Sagentia

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