Weekly Wrap: The World Cup’s spectrum bottleneck

In early May, as part of its preparations for the FIFA World Cup, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) named a frequency coordinator for the US venues and waived two of its own rules: the distance-separation requirement that keeps low-power audio equipment clear of TV transmitters, and the power ceiling that limits how that equipment may operate in the TV bands and the 600 MHz duplex gap.

A tournament sold as a single global broadcast is, underneath, three sovereign spectrum regimes stitched together

The regulator has had to take similar action for major events, such as the Olympics, conventions and presidential inaugurations, for decades. What’s worth noticing is not the machinery but what it’s straining against. Each time this play is run, the waivers have to reach a little further because the usable spectrum keeps shrinking beneath them.

America’s wireless mics are crammed into the 470–608 MHz range, which they share with broadcasters, public safety users and a growing population of unlicensed white space devices. The industry used to be able to access the 600 MHz band, but that was sold to mobile operators at the 2017 incentive auction.

Ever since, large events have survived in the US by borrowing spectrum through temporary permits the FCC hands out on a case-by-case basis. It’s a slow, uncertain workaround rather than a fix. And the squeeze is tightening. The FCC’s notice about the World Cup flags a newer rival for the band: unlicensed transmitters, mostly rural internet equipment, that tap the empty gaps between TV channels and share the same frequencies the mics depend on.

The cameras tell the same story from a different direction. Wireless cameras and newsgathering links live in a handful of microwave bands, and each one is being colonised. 2 GHz, a primary videolink band, lost its lower slice to mobile “emerging technologies”, which is why the modern channel plan begins at 2025.5 MHz instead of 1990.

The 6.4 and 7 GHz camera bands are the very segments the FCC overlaid with unlicensed devices. And the 13 GHz band now shares space, equally, with the gateway earth stations of non-geostationary satellite constellations.

So the picture of this World Cup in terms of spectrum is one of managed shortage. The coordination work is precise because the spectrum situation no longer leaves any margin for error. A clean broadcast of this World Cup will simply prove that the waivers and clever workarounds work, not that the underlying allocation does.

The demands are still multiplying, in real time, on the football field itself. This is the tournament where the match ball carries a sensor transmitting its position hundreds of times a second to feed semi-automated offside, where referees wear body cameras beaming a live first-person feed into the broadcast, where players are scanned into AI-driven 3D models, and the host operation pushes near-real-time video to a Dallas hub at sub-five-second latency.

Every one of these is another transmitter, another link, another slice of spectrum that has to be found, cleared, and protected inside the same crowded bands.

Each tournament arrives with more wireless on the field, and during one of these tournaments, the bands allocated to broadcast production and PMSE will simply be too full.

The cherry on top is that the FCC’s rules and waivers stop at the US border. The other five host cities sit in Mexico and Canada, under their own regulators, with their own band plans, and their own queues. A tournament sold as a single global broadcast is, underneath, three sovereign spectrum regimes stitched together, and the FCC’s rules impose special limits on auxiliary operations near the Canadian line.

The football will look seamless. The spectrum used to help make it happen is anything but. Hats off to the coordinators and RF engineers keeping the show on the road!

Here’s what else PolicyTracker covered this week:

• Australian regulator ACMA’s pricing for a swathe of expiring spectrum licences remains largely unchanged, despite a reported threat of legal action.
• The sale of Singapore’s MNO M1 to rival Simba Telecom is off, following allegations of “an unauthorised use of frequency spectrum”.
• EchoStar has offered to sell its remaining terrestrial spectrum by 2029.
• UK MNOs are providing a “poor‑quality service” on at least 58 per cent of train journeys, according to a new report commissioned by Ofcom.
• The UK’s live events industry has warned Ofcom that there are no viable alternatives to the frequencies used by professional sound production.