The UK choices and assumptions

Written on 3:14 AM by ooe

The fundamental assumptions on which spectrum management in the UK was built were agreed during debates in the regulatory forum: the DSL Task Group responsible for advising OFTEL through the Network Interoperability Consultative Committee about technical issues associated with local loop unbundling in the UK. The agreements were made during discussions in early 2000 and broadly were as follows:

• That the plan must be as nearly as possible system agnostic in that the method (a) from the previous section should not be used. This was mandated by the lack of flexibility of such an approach.

• That all geographical areas would be treated the same, primarily as no basis for regulation could be found that could justify treating different areas differently.

• That all pairs in a cable must be treated identically, i.e. that pair selection was not permitted. To a large extent this decision was necessitated by the random jointing practices used in the UK network which meant that controlling and recording pair usage in cables would have been insurmountably difficult.

• That repeaters would not be permitted. Originally this was primarily motivated by the need to keep initial approaches to the spectrum management plan as simple as possible, and in any case there was no pre-existing population of repeaters that forced their consideration. However, at the time of writing it seems that the tendency to immutability of spectrum management plans has already made itself felt and it now seems unlikely that repeaters will ever be permitted.

• Finally it was set as an objective that the UK spectrum management plan should be simple and clear to maximise clarity and simplify enforcement.