In February a government is going to switch off a working consumer technology on a fixed date, and millions of television sets that function perfectly will stop showing anything. There is no precedent for this at consumer scale, and it is being explained almost entirely in terms of picture quality.

Picture quality is not the reason. The reason is the frequencies.

Analogue television occupies a large block of spectrum in a part of the range with unusually good physical behaviour. Signals at those frequencies travel a long way from a single mast and pass through walls and rain in a manner that higher bands simply do not. That combination is close to ideal for mobile networks, which is why the bidding for the vacated space ran into billions.

A digital broadcast fits into a fraction of the room an analogue one needs, so switching everyone over frees an enormously valuable asset. The transition is a spectrum reallocation, presented as an upgrade, funded partly by the people being upgraded.

I do not think that is scandalous. The spectrum genuinely is more useful for data than for carrying the same programmes less efficiently, and the auction proceeds are real money. It is just a different justification from the one on the leaflets, and the honest version would survive being said aloud.

The part that will go badly is the converter boxes.

The households still relying on an aerial are disproportionately old, poor, or both, which is precisely the group least likely to hear about a coupon scheme, request a voucher, choose a device, connect it correctly, and retune it. Every step of that is trivial for anyone reading this and is a genuine obstacle for a person who has operated the same television the same way since 1985.

And the failure mode is not degraded reception. Analogue faded, so a weak signal produced a snowy picture you could still follow. Digital does not fade. It works, and then at some threshold it stops, and what you get is a black screen with no indication of whether the problem is the aerial, the box, the transmitter, or the weather.

Expect a bad fortnight in February, a great deal of it affecting people with nobody to ring.