A UN telecoms meeting has decided to give mobile service providers access to bandwidth currently reserved for terrestrial UHF television broadcasts, offering the promise of high-speed Internet access on-the-move anywhere in the world by 2015, at lower cost.

A U.S. government auction scheduled for February is expected to fetch up to US$15 billion from the sale of bandwidth in the 698 to 806 megahertz range.

The same frequencies will be available for mobile services throughout the Americas, China, India, Japan, Korea and a number of other Asian countries, while the rest of the world will initially only use the 790 to 862 megahertz range.