New business strategies and marketing opportunities utilizing a liberalized spectrum management framework

The current global move to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial television has opened up an opportunity for the re-allocation of valuable spectrum resources in VHF/UHF frequencies. In one way, spectrum bands once used for analogue TV broadcasting will be completely cleared, leaving a space for deploying new licensed wireless services, and in another way, digital terrestrial television technology geographically interleaves spectrum bands to avoid interference between neighboring stations, leaving a space for deploying new unlicensed wireless services. In this context, this paper studies spectrum availability in VHF/UHF frequencies, elaborates on their exploitation under a dynamic management approach and discusses their potential business strategies for introducing secondary systems/services within primary bands (i.e. TV bands). Following existing technological and scientific approaches for dynamic spectrum access, it presents a liberalised spectrum exploitation, based on "spectrum commons" and "spectrum markets" regimes rather than the custom "command and control" one.