About a year ago, in a few cities in the Philippines, tens of thousands of cable TV customers began reporting that the TV channels they were used to watching on their local cable systems weren’t working right. The reason was that a telco, putting an old frequency license to new use, had begun rolling out an LTE wireless system in those cities in the 3.5 GHz band.
As time passed, more and more cities have been affected. Mitigation measures took months to implement, with cable customers and cable operators bearing the cost in terms of equipment upgrades and huge customer disruptions. Some channels are lost forever; others can be restored.
The Philippine Cable TV Association (PCTA) an association of small-to-medium cable TV enterprises in the provinces, who have been most affected by the interference, produced a short video documentary, recording the problems their members have suffered…..and their urgent hope that the problem can be brought under control. On the video, Jose Luis Dabao (PCTA VP for the Visayas islands) says
“The cable TV community is extremely worried that as the rollout continues…the cable TV customers may experience even more problems than we currently are. More channels and many more cities and towns will be affected. If telcos start deploying LTE signals in standard C-band, as we have heard they may, we will not be able to receive any of our satellite C-band channels at all.”
The video is an important testimony from the grassroots, in a tropical developing country – typical of so many tropical countries which rely heavily on C-band satellite transmissions. It gives the lie to the mobile industry lobbyists who claim that their signals (ubiquitous and powerful) can co-exist in near frequency bands with others. It’s well worth watching.
