A Visual Guide to 700 MHz

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by Rich Brome
March 28, 2008

The U.S. government recently auctioned off a large, important band of radio spectrum aptly named the "700 MHz band". The name may be simple, but digging into the details of this band, things get complicated quickly, so we've created this handy guide to explain all the nitty-gritty details.

The auctions for the 700 MHz band were conducted by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission,) the arm of the government responsible for (among other things) regulating radio spectrum and the industries that use it.

Since the beginning of the decade, the FCC has been working hard to rid the airwaves of inefficient analog television broadcasts, and replace them with a variety of more efficient digital services. This includes digital television, of course, but digital television - even in high-definition - is efficient enough that the move to digital will free a significant amount of radio spectrum for things other than television, such as new cell phone service.

The 700 MHz band is some of that newly-freed spectrum. It spans 698 - 806 MHz, which used to be UHF TV channels 52 - 69.

What the FCC just auctioned off in "Auction 73" is only part of the 700 MHz band. Some parts of the 700 MHz band were already sold off in earlier auctions, but it all dovetails together. If we only talked about Auction 73, you'd only get half the story, so we'll be covering the whole 700 MHz band in this article.

The following pages explore the details of the new 700 MHz band in depth. We're going to skip some of the basics of radio frequency bands in this article, but that doesn't mean you should. If you haven't read the primer we created for the last major FCC auction (the AWS band,) or you think you could use a refresher, be sure to go through the first three sections of our Visual Guide to AWS before going any further:

Basics

Bands

Blocks

Now, for the rest of this article we'll assume you know all about bands, blocks, CMAs, and Hertz. Ready?

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