Have you ever found yourself on a train, in a park, or at a ball game wishing you could pay a bill you'd forgotten about, or send a quick message, or download a tune stuck in your mind? According to Aloha, there are enough people who want to be "always on" to support a nationwide mobile broadband Internet service. The company, which resold its channel 55 spectrum to Qualcomm, was the big victor in the 54/59 channel-pair auctions. Aloha won 125 out of the 734 regional auctions and increased its holdings by buying the other two big winners. Aloha claims it now has spectrum in 244 of the 734 licensed markets, covering 175 million potential customers, including 100 percent coverage in the nation's 10 largest markets and 84 percent coverage in the top 40 markets.

Though not revealing which technologies it will deploy, Aloha did announce last year that it would launch a 2005 market trial of mobile broadband Internet access using Flash-OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing). Developed by Flarion Technologies Inc., in Bedminster, N.J., Flash-OFDM is a spread-spectrum technology that uses the Internet Protocol. Signals jump quickly from frequency to frequency within a given channel in a seemingly random pattern generated by an algorithm. The resulting signal causes minimal interference with those in the same and neighboring channels and is itself not easily interfered with. Different base stations use different hopping patterns, further reducing interference and allowing the bandwidth to be used efficiently. The FCC recently granted Aloha permission to run a market test in Tucson, Ariz., presumably of Flash-OFDM.

Two auctions held so far accounted for just 24 MHz of the 108 MHz that will eventually be sold. Of the 84 MHz remaining, in 1997 the FCC reserved 24 MHz for public-safety communications, such as police and fire services—those located at four of today's UHF TV channels, 63, 64, 68, and 69. Since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Congress has been paying a lot of attention to the public-safety communications plan, originally with little fanfare. In fact, congressional eagerness to reallocate the swath of spectrum is the main impetus behind a drive to set a firm date for the transition to digital television. The Save Lives Act of 2005, introduced in the Senate in June, calls for expediting the reassignment of the spectrum for public-safety purposes and requires spectrum to be taken back from broadcasters by 1 January 2009.

Although Congress is driving the agenda to free portions of spectrum for public-safety use, local governments will decide how they will be used. Metropolitan-area governments, for example, would like to alleviate the congestion that plagues existing emergency services. They are concerned with voice and text transmission, already in use, and are looking to add wideband transmission of images. On-the-scene images can help emergency responders and their dispatchers. With broadband access to stored records, fire or police teams could review building plans and blueprints.

After the auctions held so far and the allocation for emergency services, 60 MHz of the bandwidth to be vacated by analog television remains to be sold [see illustration, "The FCC Auction Plan"]. This section, consisting of channels 52, 53, 56 to 58, 60 to 62, and 65 to 67, is slated to be divided into five blocks. Four of the five will be channel pairs: 52 and 57, 53 and 58, a pair of 5-MHz channels in 60 and 65, and a pair of 10-MHz channels in 61 to 62 and 66 to 67. Channel pairs can best be used for services that require the same capacity in each direction, like today's cellphone services.

The fifth block will consist of today's channel 56, which is better suited for one-way transmission, such as broadcasting to cellphones. It could also be used for services that can utilize an existing cellphone channel as the return path—for example, video on demand, in which your request is phoned in and then the material is sent to your cellphone over the broadband channel. The FCC plans to offer the blocks in six regional areas, making it simpler for well-funded companies planning to roll out national services to assemble bandwidth.

The sale of the five blocks will complete the reallocation. The oft-quoted $50 billion valuation for the 108 MHz may be too high, given that the first 24 MHz sold netted $685 million and that the 24-MHz public-safety spectrum won't be sold at all. The $50 billion number comes from a May 2004 estimate by the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.­based public policy institute, citing FCC and other data. On the other hand, it is possible that the chunks of spectrum auctioned in the first two rounds went cheap because buyers didn't know when they would actually get them.

If a firm date is set and the auctions for the remaining spectrum sections are held not too far ahead of that date, the auctions of the remaining 60 MHz could bring the total raised up to $30 billion. Congress is expected to require that a portion of those proceeds, probably less than $5 billion, be used to fund subsidies to help low-income families convert their analog TV sets to digital.

Whenever so much money and infrastructure are at stake, there are inevitably winners and losers. The companies bringing in the bids at the auctions appear initially to be winners, but some of their ventures are bound to fail.

Manufacturers will be huge winners. New services and technologies necessitate new equipment. Sales of televisions, studio gear, and other consumer and professional equipment are already growing. Still to come are business opportunities opened by new mobile services.

Broadcasters should be winners. By upgrading their technological backbones, they have improved their quality of service and now have the flexibility to pursue new opportunities such as narrowcasting to niche markets. However, while broadcasters have invested heavily in the digital transition, they have not yet fully exploited digital's advantages of higher-definition pictures and new services.

Broadcasters have two strategic advantages over cable and satellite providers. For one, local broadcast stations know their markets in a way no national programmer can. For another, broadcast television is wireless and eminently portable; viewers don't have to plug into the cable network or to a carefully aligned satellite dish. They don't even have to find small hot spots, since receivers pick up broadcast signals almost anywhere. But broadcasters are only now starting to use HDTV in their local programming, primarily for news. And U.S. digital service does not support mobile service to vehicles and pedestrians with handheld devices. It is telling that reassigned broadcast spectrum is being used to offer mobile video services that broadcasters themselves are unable to support. Nor is this now a priority for them.

Political leaders might be losers, if they are perceived as forcing unwanted change and expense on the public. And if the transition is disruptive, they will be blamed. But overall, governments should be big winners. When the transition is completed, governments will have served their constituencies well by shifting broadcast television to a superior, more flexible service and by reallocating vacated broadcast spectrum to other useful services.

In the short term, some consumers, particularly the least well-off, will be losers. They will see blank, snowy screens on their antenna-fed analog TVs when analog service is terminated. To continue receiving programming, they will need to buy and install digital conversion set-top boxes or switch to cable or satellite service. Either way, it's going to cost them.

In the end, though, consumers will be winners, with new and improved services available. They will have access to HDTV's great pictures, accompanied by surround-sound audio. They will have uniformly high-quality reception anywhere in a broadcast area, and additional services will include some within traditional broadcast channels but even more coming in the auctioned broadcast spectrum.