1,200 MHz becomes licence-exempt on 10 November with no coordinator registered to use it.

Start with what the two instruments say, because almost every account of this week's change describes it as a Wi-Fi story and it is not. The Wireless Telegraphy (Dynamic Spectrum Access Service) (Frequencies) Regulations 2026 run to a single operative sentence: "The radio frequency band 5925 megahertz to 7125 megahertz is specified for the purposes of section 53A(7)(a)". The Wireless Telegraphy (Dynamic Spectrum Access Devices) (Exemption) Regulations 2026 then exempt standard power access points, fixed client devices and mobile client devices from the licensing requirement in section 8(1) of the Act. Both were made on 27 October 2026 and both come into force on 10 November 2026, seven days from this edition's date.

The powers are not small. A standard power access point may run 23 dBm per megahertz of power spectral density and 36 dBm EIRP — 3.98 watts — in a nominal channel up to 320 MHz wide, at a fixed location, outdoors, with no licence and no fee. For comparison, the band immediately below it, where ordinary Wi-Fi lives, is capped far lower and indoors. This is the first time a British regulator has put four watts of outdoor transmit power into the hands of anybody who buys a conforming radio.

Now the condition that nobody is reading. Regulation 11 defines an "AFC system" as an automated radio frequency co-ordination system run by an organisation registered by OFCOM under section 53A(1). Regulation 12 requires an access point to request operational parameters from such a system before it transmits, to repeat the request every 24 hours, and — if the system cannot be reached on a second or later attempt — to run for one further 24-hour period and then cease operation. There is no fallback to a default power, no grandfathering and no self-coordination. The exemption is conditional on a private database that must exist, and Ofcom's own page, published 20 July 2026, says only that successful applicants "will be added to Ofcom-maintained register of approved providers". Applications opened in early September. It names no one.

So read the sequence as a market and not as a timetable. Parliament created the power to register dynamic spectrum access providers in section 8(1) of the Digital Economy Act 2017; it came into force on 31 July 2017 under SI 2017/765 and a full-text search of legislation.gov.uk returns exactly two instruments ever titled "dynamic spectrum access", both made on 27 October 2026. The statute book waited nine years and three months to use a power it already had, and then commenced the exemption before the only thing that can satisfy it exists.

Here is the price of what is being given away, read off Ofcom's own schedules. A Shared Access licence — the nearest thing the UK has to coordinated, non-exclusive spectrum you can buy — costs £80 a year per 10 MHz in rural areas, and £160 per 10 MHz for an urban medium power licence. At the rural price, 1,200 MHz would be £9,600 a year; at the urban price, £19,200 a year. Those are 21.43% and 42.87% of this edition's whole annual income target. At the price Ofcom's last auction actually set — £1,379,400,000 on 27 April 2021 for 200 MHz across two bands, or £6,897,000 a megahertz — the same 1,200 MHz prices at £8,276,400,000. That comparison flatters the giveaway and should be read with its caveat: auctioned spectrum is exclusive, nationwide and interference-protected for twenty years, and this is none of those things.

Somebody is already moving. Companies House carries SCOT-TEL-GOULD LIMITED, company SC386653, incorporated 7 October 2010 at Suite F2 Enterprise Centre, Exploration Drive, Aberdeen, SIC 61200 wireless telecommunications activities, accounts last made up to 31 October 2025, with four serving directors including David Maxwell Gould, appointed on the day it was incorporated. Light Reading reported on 29 September 2026 that the firm applied for an experimental licence to trial Tarana's G1 6 GHz base nodes near Aberdeen, and quoted Ivo Lansky, Tarana's business lead for Europe, the UK and Central Asia, saying that once the spectrum is released the extra channels can be switched on in radios already deployed. Ofcom sells an Innovation and trial licence from £50. That is the whole barrier to touching the band before the AFC exists: fifty pounds and a reason.

And this is where the edition stops being an opportunity and starts being an observation. $500 is £373.25 at HMRC's November rate. The only live listing located for a conforming 6 GHz radio — a Cambium ePMP Force 4600C subscriber module, EU variant, at Aerial.net — is €391.67 excluding VAT, which is £326.49, or 87.47% of the entire stake, and it was out of stock when read. A link needs two of them. Two radios and the £50 trial licence come to £702.98, which is $941.72 and £329.74 more than the stake. The spectrum is free. The transmitter is not, and it is the transmitter that is scarce.