EU May Push for Competitive Spectrum Trading

anaesthetica writes "The Financial Times is reporting that Viviane Reding, the EU media commissioner, wants to spur a pan-European market through which companies could buy and sell cross-border access to the European spectrum regime, including frequencies used by TV, radio, mobile telephone and broadband services. Large European media companies are skeptical about the spectrum trading plan, saying both that there is no logic behind a pan-European telecom model, and that such a plan could interfere with satellite radio. Ms. Reding believes that the change would spur harmonization of the fragmented European telecom band allocation. This change is set to coincide with the 2012 switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting, when a significant portion of the spectrum will be freed up."

Comments

Re:Standard static

[MichaelSmith]

I feel sorry already for the extraterrestrial's SETI programs - they only have a small window of less than a century to grab our raw carrier waves.

I think it was Arthur C Clarke who suggested this as a reason for the failure of SETI. Nobody else is wasting energy by broadcasting either.

I think overall the amount of leakage into space from earth will be greater in the future but it will be so heavily compressed and spread across the available spectrum that it may be confused with noise.