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Introduction

This Report has been produced in line with the Radiocommunications Agency's commitment to publish detailed statistics on spectrum usage in the land mobile radio bands.

The Report provides information on the private business radio (PBR) services which were licensed to operate on frequencies in the range 26 - 466 MHz at 31 December 2002. It also provides details of the spectrum allocated to land mobile radio services.

The report is in two sections:

Part 1: PBR Licence Statistics

Part 1 provides detailed statistics on PBR licences that were in force at the end of 2002. The tables in Part 1 provide a breakdown of licensing data by various licence and business use categories. Data on the number of PBR frequency assignments and mobiles is provided for some licence categories.

In July 2002 the Agency introduced the PBR UK General Licence to replace the PMR (Standard) UK General Licence. The new licence allows customers access to one or more of 15 frequencies for a fixed fee, regardless of the number of mobiles used. Therefore, information on numbers of mobiles/assignments for the UK General category can no longer be provided. The number of licences on issue at the end of 2002 can be found in the 'Other Private Business Radio Licences' table.

Significant effects during the year include the return of one High Band and nine Low Band national exclusive channels. In addition several large licences were terminated during 2002. More details can be found in the 'Other Private Business Radio Licences' table.

Part 2: Land Mobile Spectrum

Part 2 provides details of the spectrum available to PBR services in the land mobile radio bands and how it is used.

This section also provides similar information about public access mobile radio, common base station, national public mobile data operator services, on-site radio paging, radio paging short term hire, local communications, short range business radio paging, and wide area paging.

The tables exclude national exclusive channel licences. There is no mobiles data available for this category, but data on the number of licences can be found in the
'Other Private Business Radio Licences' table and there is a breakdown of assignments by frequency band.
The data on the Medical and Utilities categories relates to shared channel licences only. It does not include services which operate on national exclusive channels.
‘Protected Service Users’ licences do not fit into any of the other categories. These users operate services which are given a high degree of protection from co-channel interference (other categories in the table can also include licensees with protected services).
Details of major licences relinquished during 2002 can be found in the
'Other Private Business Radio Licences' table.
The tables no longer include data on the UK General category (see Introduction). Last year this category accounted for a total of 3,189 licences and 61,735 mobiles of which 463 licences (14,355 mobiles) were included in the Government, Medical, Utilities, Protected Service and ‘Other’ Users categories.

NUMBER OF LICENCES AT 31 DECEMBER 2002

NUMBER OF MOBILES AT 31 DECEMBER 2002

The tables exclude national exclusive channel licences. There is no mobiles data available for this category, but data on the number of licences can be found in the 'Other Private Business Radio Licences' table and there is a breakdown of assignments by frequency band.
The data on the Medical and Utilities categories relates to shared channel licences only. It does not include services which operate on national exclusive channels.
‘Protected Service Users’ licences do not fit into any of the other categories. These users operate services which are given a high degree of protection from co-channel interference (other categories in the table can also include licensees with protected services).

Note: the reduction in the number of licences and mobiles is mainly due to the removal of the UK General category (see Introduction and footnote 5)