Spectrum Policy Calls Offer Unique Challenges, Paper Asserts
Government policymakers should be careful about relying too heavily on outside forecasts that show spiraling wireless data demand, said Armand Musey, president of the Summit Ridge Group, and Aalok Mehta, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, in…
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a new paper. The stakes are higher in wireless when policymakers get things wrong, they argue. “Unlike most other resources, the electromagnetic spectrum, by its very nature, is a physically limited resource; no new frequencies can ever be created or destroyed,” they wrote. “In general, this means that once spectrum is allocated to one set of users, it is not available for alternative applications or technologies.” This differs from wireline, they said: In wireline industries, expansion of fiber backbones -- even when this requires access to public resources such as rights-of-way -- "does not generally crowd out the ability of competing companies or applications to deploy their own infrastructure.” Spectrum is also a public resource, they said. “Its exploitation carries a much stronger consideration of public welfare than many other resources.” Decisions about spectrum are long lasting, they said. “Moving incumbent users off spectrum bands in response to technological or economic changes, for example, is generally time-consuming, expensive, and contentious, often taking billions of dollars of upfront investment to facilitate relocation and more than a decade to complete.” The two said in a footnote that they weren't compensated by any party for writing the paper.