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November 18, 2013

Should Spectrum Be Regulated Like Houses, Apartments, or Hotels?

As much as regulator policy decisions have implications for service provider revenue, profit, operating and capital investment costs, it goes without saying that new technology developments can affect the ways regulators are able to create policies as well.

For most of communications history, regulators essentially treated spectrum allocated to users as though spectrum were single family homes. There was one licensed user for each block of spectrum, and the uses of that spectrum also were specified.

Spectrum, in other words, was zoned for residential use only. In some ways, Wi-Fi was a big break from tradition, as it used a different real estate metaphor. “Wi-Fi is more like an apartment building,” where multiple users can share a single bit of physical real estate, according to Oh Ser Wah, Institute for Infocomm Research TV white space program head.

Image via Shutterstock

Oh believes TV white spaces might create yet another metaphor—that of a hotel, with guests temporarily occupying rooms.

That creates one set of issues and opportunities for national regulators, who must ensure that signal interference policies are adequate, for example.

Other challenges could come as well. As the cost and capabilities of software defined radios and cognitive radio improve, it could become possible to create radios able to connect with and use any bit of spectrum from one megahertz up to perhaps 3 gigahertz to 6 gigahertz.

In that case, a single device could, in principle, hop around and use whatever spectrum was not currently in use, and sense when it was necessary to hop off to another frequency if licensed users began to fill the channel.

That will pose brand-new regulatory challenges for regulators, who presently simply bar such access.

Assuming the interference issues can be assured, a new scenario arises. There would be no need to specify what apps could be used on any single block of frequency, and, in fact, it might not be so necessary to assign exclusive use of frequency to a single entity on an exclusive basis.

Instead, the new principle would be that any app or device could use any block of frequency that was either vacant or lightly used, automatically hopping off when a licensed user or total traffic begins to build.

That radical new approach to maximizing the use of spectrum might well be a reality in the future. Whether regulators will be able to significantly revise spectrum policy then becomes a new and challenging issue.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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