The Radio Mic petition

[Ynot]

Petition's up to 3,530 now - don't know which day it started, but as the end-date is June 19th, I'm going to assume that it started on a 19th - likely 19/2/07 (day before Stuart posted this thread).

So that's an average of just under 600 a day so far...

 

At that rate we could hit 71,000 or so by the time we get to the deadline.

Not an insignificant number, though not as high as 2 million - but then not as many people will feel that this affects them.........

 

We can but try!

[Dj Dunc]

see this link http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails....amp;SESSION=885

 

it shows that currently there are 75 signatures on EDM 531, and is pretty up-to-date

[Bobbsy]

My local MP is, alas, not on the list so a long email is now on it's way.

 

One minor "zinger" I thought of as I was typing is that politicians often use radio mics during their campaigns and could lose this ability! I'm proud of that one!

 

Bob

[mikienorth]

What about conference season??

I'm all MP contacted out - but I get a new one in a couple of weeks.........

I'll be mentioning the impact of this on conference - put it in the context of something they all know, but then do they all like conference???

[lightsource]

Just a thought ( so don't slice my throat ;) )

 

Is there anyone out there who could post a 'standard' document that BR users could copy and paste to send to their MP's.

 

There are a lot of BR users that probably don't fully realise the potential of this problem, or don't think that this affects them.

 

Just the simple facts, just enough to get an MP's attention ( think of a single celled creature and you're probably halfway there :D

[Bobbsy]

I think we've discussed at length already that "form letters" are quickly detected and don't carry nearly as much weight with MPs as personally-crafted letters. However, as a compromise, here is a bullet point summary you can use to write your own missive:

 

-You want your MP to actively support Early Day Motion 531. He can view the motion on this link: http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails....amp;SESSION=885

 

-You urge him to give this support because proposals in the OFCOM "Digital Dividend" document could have disasterous consequences for radio microphone users all over the UK.

 

-Big radio microphone users such as West End musicals have received a lot of publicity lately but the reality is that virtually every school, church, youth group and Amdram society will also be affected. Even politicians and political parties would have difficulties without adequate radio mic frequencies.

 

-The current compromise proposal to deregulate Channel 69 for radio mic use is inadequate. Even relatively small users need more than one channel; large ones need multiple channels.

 

-Any proposal that shifts the permitted frequencies to another band would be prohibitively expensive, especially for the small user.

 

-Finally, the reason that an open-market auction is not suitable for radio mic frequencies is that, rather than a single large industry, their are literally thousands of small users.

 

That's basically the points I made in my letter. I'm sure others will come up with different and better arguments or want a different emphasis, but the above should get you started.

 

Bob

[lightsource]

Thanks Bobbsy, that was pretty much what I was looking for....

 

I Don't really require a pre-written letter, just something that picks up on the finer points I may have missed...

 

 

( I'm a bit illiterate on this subject, but as I will require a range of radio mic's in the future, then I really want to state my case, It's just a topic I haven't researched too much recently).

[dirkenstein]

I think the point that Bobbsy rather missed in his analysis is that the TV spectrum being cleared by Ofcom simply has a higher monetary value to other potential users than it does to the entertainment industry, so any solution that is purely driven by market forces is likely to be unviable for us. This would even be the case if every outfit in the entertainment industry, from the big West End production companies through to every village hall am-dram company clubbed together to capitalise a spectrum holding company that bought a slice of spectrum.

 

If this company had to buy spectrum at the current market rates it would have to charge channel usage at rates that are simply unaffordable to even the most high-margin parts of our industry.

 

Let us perform a dumb calculation with many dumb assumptions. Note that accuracy is unimportant. The calculation shows that the current market price of spectrum is unaffordable to the entertainment industry by at least an order of magnitude, if not two.

 

The 3G auctions resulted in the most expensive slice of spectrum (2x15MHz slots) being sold at £4.3billion.

 

We can make the assumption that this was vastly overpriced, with the auction model resulting in incumbent 2G mobile spectrum paying over the odds to enter this market and new suppliers driving up the prices to keep them out. Note that the economics of this auction are still keeping various academic economists in wild discussion so my assumption of this spectrum being overpriced by today's standards may be largely true in hindsight but would be heavily debated if you phrased the question as asking whether the auction itself was an inefficient way of allocating this resource to third parties.

 

So let's make the wild assumption that today, 30MHz of spectrum would sell at £430m. Probably a low-end assumption. That would be 5 cleared TV channels.

 

Or £14.3m per MHz.

 

Or £2.8m per radio mic channel, if you could get 5 200KHz channels in each MHz without interference.

 

To be able to reliably raise the money to buy these channels, you need to be able to return about 10% of capital

cost p.a. as revenue.

 

So you'd need to charge at least £280,000 per year for continuous, exclusive, country-wide use of a channel.

Or £767/day.

 

Or 54p/minute.

 

Which is the same sort of price as you'd pay for peak-time cross-carrier mobile calls without any special discounts or free minutes.

 

Of course, you can probably share a channel amongst (pulls figure out of hat) at least 100

simultaneous users country-wide.

 

So charge a user .5p a minute.

 

Seems cheap?

 

£7.20 a day.

 

£2600 a year.

 

Over 30x the current shared radio license cost (£80/year)- for 1 channel.

 

About 100x the single channel fixed site fee (£24/year).

 

So can you share a particular channel amongst 10k simultaneous users countrywide to get it in the same price bracket as the current pricing scheme?

 

Would there even 10k simultaneous users expected for any radio mic channel?

 

Note the number of sharing users only helps them pay less for the channel. You can only charge these lower prices if you really do have 10/100/10000 users all renting the same channel off you, otherwise you have to charge more to make up your 10% return.

 

Ofcom estimates the 'value to the nation' of the entertainments industry at 100-500m p.a.

 

Buying 14 shared license channels for entertainment industry use with borrowed money would cost £3.9m p.a.

(or £39m outright)

 

So between 0.7% and 3% of this 'value to the nation'.

 

And this would not provide enough channels for major productions.

 

50 Channels would cost 14m p.a. or 140m outright.

 

So enough channels (as many as are available now) might cost 10 or 15% of this yearly value.

 

Unless my assumptions are pessimistic by at least a factor of 10 to 100, this gives some indication of the commercial pressures we face.

 

Ofcom may be on our side. The Treasury won't be.

 

Write to your MP.

 

 

 

Moderation: Several inches of unnecessary blank screen edited off the bottom of this message.

[Bobbsy]

I was trying to do my own calculations of the same thing a while back and think I've spotted a major error in your assumptions.

 

The ridiculously expensive 3G costs were for national coverage. On the other hand, each individual radio mic user only needs his chunk of spectrum to cover a few hundred square metres. However, the "power users" need rather more than your five channels for use within their small chunk of geographical area. Conversely, there are huge swathes of countryside where no allocation for radio mics would be needed at all....until a plane crashes or something and the broadcast guys move in for a day or two!

 

Basically, when I got to this stage in the though process I gave up on trying to cost things out. What this means is that there is no way radio mic users can ever fit into the conventional spectrum auction model.

 

...which says to me that, although we got there by completely different routes, we both came to the same conclusion as your last two lines:

 

Ofcom may be on our side. The Treasury won't be.

 

Write to your MP.

 

That's the best advice I can think of for now.

 

Bob

[paulears]

I've always wondered why with all the pressure on spectrum, the UHF military airband has such a huge amount of space, with very little in it, and what is there taking up far more bandwidth than it needs, using modern comms technology. There is nearly 200Mhz worth of it all reserved, just in case - as it has been for decades! Why they can't free up a little of this I don't know.

[Andrew C]

Why they can't free up a little of this I don't know.

Why do we always buy expensive, inadequate kit for the military? Or the wrong ships? Why is everything under-costed, and comes in over-priced?

 

Politics, and they have "Friends" in both High Places, and BAE. :blink:

[dbuckley]

So let's make the wild assumption that today, 30MHz of spectrum would sell at £430m. ... To be able to reliably raise the money to buy these channels, you need to be able to return about 10% of capital

cost p.a. as revenue.

Which is £43m PA.

 

On the link to the petition it says "That this House applauds the work done by the British Entertainment Industry Radio Group (BEIRG) in highlighting the imminent threat to a £15 billion per annum British entertainment".

 

£43m / £15bn = 0.28%. About one quarter of one percent for wireless spectrum. Mr Joe Public (and Mr Joe MP) would consider that to be eminently affordable, I'd have thought.

[Bobbsy]

I wish the BEIRG site hadn't pushed the 15 million figure so hard. That's got to be turnover, not profit. The trouble is, for every big musical that makes a bundle, there are several shows that barely break even...or lose money hand over fist.

 

Beyond that, the auction solution does nothing at all for all the amdram societies, churches, youth groups, etc. that also want radio mics and have little or no budget for spectrum.

 

Bob

[lightsource]

I wish the BEIRG site hadn't pushed the 15 million figure so hard. That's got to be turnover, not profit. The trouble is, for every big musical that makes a bundle, there are several shows that barely break even...or lose money hand over fist.

 

Beyond that, the auction solution does nothing at all for all the amdram societies, churches, youth groups, etc. that also want radio mics and have little or no budget for spectrum.

 

Bob

 

 

Or charities doing fund raiser events.

 

There are some big charities out there, probably in some circumstances, using their own kit.

[dbuckley]

I wish the BEIRG site hadn't pushed the 15 million figure so hard.

Not 15 million Bob, 15 BILLION. So yeah, thats turnover :blink: Or I really am in the wrong business!!!

 

Yep, it's a daft thing to have done, in my opinion. Is the entire industry worth £15bn/annum? Who would know?? They've tried to use a big number to make apparent the scale of the potential losses, but instead have (load 12 bore, aim down, gently pull trigger) just suggested the industry has a really really really large turnover, and yes, The Treasury ought to have a piece of that pie, just like they have a piece of other radio user's pies.

 

OFCOM had estimated the value to the country of the business at tops £500m, then saying they may have underestimated it, but 30x is a bit of a large factor...