Wired:In the next few years, a massive exodus of the airwaves is about to take place, writes Danny O'Brien

Analogue television, whose signals sprawl over a prime piece of radio frequency real estate, at around 700MHz, will be turned off. The fight for who gets it next will be the gold rush of the early 21st century and, especially in the United States, may well determine whether all-important communications will switch to an internet model, or whether the old barons of the telephone and mobile industry hold on to their current fiefdoms.

Old-style television signals were incredibly wasteful compared to modern digital transmissions. The area in which the old analogue TV channels fit is now a potentially vast new territory, with all manner of useful characteristics for modern communication. It can penetrate walls and buildings; the optimal positioning of transmitters is known; it suffers little interference from other signals. Anyone with a right to transmit in this territory could roll out a broadband network to compete with cable, satellite or DSL.

More importantly, perhaps, to governments, it is a landscape they can sell off to the highest bidder. Just as the auctions for 3G brought in huge one-off sums for the public purse in the 1990s, the auctioning off of the analogue TV spectrum is expected to provide a huge fillip. It is estimated that the US auction alone will raise $12 billion.

So who is going to get it? In the US, the real question boils down to whether the frequencies will pass to new companies or be bought up by rich incumbents of wireless and wired communications.

This old guard has been remarkably successful in the US in fending off competitors in the domestic broadband market. Despite the break-up of the old AT&T monopoly, underregulation and multiple mergers have led to it re-emerging across the country.

If new companies obtain the 700Mhz band, they can be expected to exploit it to compete with this established bloc. But if the incumbents snatch control, even this rich landscape may well be left underutilised.

Before the bidding can begin, the US governing body, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), must decide on the rules of the game.

The FCC has a reputation for being unnecessarily friendly to the concerns of incumbents, and the old guard has already won one important concession: at every step of the complex bidding procedure, the incumbents will know exactly who is trying to obtain what spectrum and for what purpose, and will be able to adjust their own strategy accordingly.

But the FCC is not entirely in the hands of the existing corporations. And US communications policy moguls are acutely aware that the US has fallen behind in broadband adoption; and many US politicians are angry that private companies have begrudged handing out the airwaves to emergency safety networks in case of disaster or terrorist attacks.

One group, Frontline, has proposed an ingenious solution: a national broadband network, taking up 10MHz of the 108Mhz freed by the analogue TV companies, run by one company, to be used by emergency services when needed, and sold to customers as a broadband connection by independent resellers the rest of the time.

What's important about this is the independent resellers: this returns the US internet to the days of independent ISPs (and brings it up to date with most countries).

Usually, the US leads the way in deciding how spectrum should be used. But it may not be that easy this time.