Internet access is provided through bandwidth available in broadcasted digital
television signals, such as the digital television signals produced by terrestrial
broadcast towers. Bandwidth is dynamically allocated or provisioned among clients,
and is managed in part by the clients, thus providing dynamic, distributed management
of spectrum allocation. Automatic provisioning may be applied among different terrestrial
transmission towers, or different satellites, among transponders or channels on
a given tower, or a given satellite, or among other forms of multiple broadcast
origination points. The provisioning dynamically and automatically equalizes load
among those multiple broadcast points. Principles of the present invention may
also be applied to automatic provisioning of digital content among non-television
broadcast sources, such as cellular telephone towers having available bandwidth,
analog or digital radio broadcasts having available bandwidth, or satellite broadcast
facilities, and/or dedicated broadcast towers or satellites operating in an allocated
spectrum and limited to broadcasting requested digital content. In a satellite
embodiment, provisioning may occur among multiple satellites as well as between
transponders or time- or frequency-multiplexed channels provided by a single satellite.