The new agreement will foster the roll-out of high speed wireless broadband systems, in particular by requiring Member States to authorise the use of the digital dividend 800 MHz band for wireless broadband by January 2013 in all but exceptional circumstances. Moreover, there will be an inventory of spectrum use in the Member States, which will be essential to monitor and ensure the most efficient allocation of spectrum resources for wireless services in Europe. At the national level last summer there was the digital dividend auction, which concretely has resulted in an additional 50% spectrum increase of what existed. This has been auctioned at national and regional levels, resulting in different successful bidders from the incumbents to newer players like the cable operator ONO.

Telefonica and other operators presented the good progress made to date in improved broadband coverage. While the TV operators emphasised that evidence such as the Eurobarometer (see number 362, 2011) still shows that terrestrial television is growing and it is present in more than 50% of European households, being the main platform for audiovisual content distribution.

The user perspective represented by the Internet Society diverged since they see little and slow progress in Internet speeds and they find the digital television interfaces not user-friendly: Since one single fiber equals 25.000 times all the spectrum, they call for a country strategy on deploying fiber. The president of the Internet Society explained that Asian countries continue to surpass Europe and North America in the adoption of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology. According to a new global ranking study by the FTTH Councils, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong occupy the top four positions in the FTTH Global Ranking. As an example South Korea at the end of 2012 will have 1.000 Mbps 100% FTTH and Asia is accounting for more than 27 million of the world's estimated 32 million FTTH connections. Thus for them, 'our future is already their present and, therefore, they beat us at opportunities and competitivity'.