Spectrum Sharing Seen as new Norm Regardless of Next Administration
Considering the amount of time and money it takes to clear spectrum bands, the next White House administration likely won't deviate far from the current spectrum sharing approach, Satellite Industry Association President Tom Stroup said during an FCBA CLE Thursday: "There may be some tweaking, but I don't expect a major shift." Speakers all indicated the questions about spectrum sharing involve its degree and how to implement it, because the question of whether it will happen is settled.
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One hurdle to tackling the interference issues that inevitably will come up with more sharing is the lack of research on quantifying interference, said NAB Vice President-Spectrum Policy Bob Weller. Historically, big geographic separations and other forms of interference protection have been based on "worst-case assumptions [piled] atop one another," Weller said. To break through those assumptions, "a lot more research is required," he said. Weller also said any regime where sharing is commonplace needs a strong enforcement arm, which is lacking now, and there will be penalties from that absence of robust enforcement.
The FCC regulates transmitters but receivers are often a bigger problem in interference issues, Weller said. Stopping short of urging the FCC to regulate receiver limits, he said that there haven't been good motivations for technical receiver improvements, and in a sharing regime "that has to change." Sharing needs to start with well-understood, well-engineered systems, like point-to-point microwave, Weller said. In the cellular band, he said, "things are very dynamic."
Driving the increased spectrum sharing talk are policies geared toward that approach, Stroup said, and minus those policies, the discussions likely wouldn't be happening. He called spectrum sharing "an opportunity" since bandwidth for different applications typically isn't used constantly. Tools also are coming to market to help, such as spectrum-sharing technology, he said.
Another possible route in the face of growing spectrum scarcity is unlicensed spectrum, especially for mobile broadband applications, said Jared Carlson, Ericsson North America vice president-government affairs and public policy. LTE-unlicensed backers, like Ericsson, and Wi-Fi advocates have been at odds on what interference risk LTE-U is to Wi-Fi (see 1509100035).
Spectrum sharing itself isn't new, but the new model is multiple networks and multiple users, leading to an exponential increase in complexity, said Patrick Welsh, Verizon director-federal regulatory affairs. Sharing is likely to be the end result in bands above 24 GHz, in 600 MHz and a big part of the 5 GHz band, he said. Asked about the role standards-setting bodies could play in sharing, Welsh said standards setting isn't necessarily faster than the regulatory process.
The spectrum available in higher-frequency bands is why they're being eyed for 5G usage, said FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Deputy Bureau Chief Ira Keltz: "These bands have so much promise." He said one of the problems in planning for 5G is the vague understanding of what it is, because it's more of a concept than "any one thing." But 5G likely will involve coordinated harnessing of higher and lower bands for data delivery, he said. "We won't know what it is until it's here."
Making decisions based on the familiar, color-coded U.S. frequency allocations chart put out by NTIA "is not a good idea," Keltz said. That chart is frequently misinterpreted by users. The size of the frequency allocations on the chart is based on logarithmic scale, not actual bandwidth size, Keltz and Wiley Rein consultant Karl Nebbia said, leading to misconceptions -- for example -- that the 1,070 KHz allocated to the AM radio band is massively larger than the 1,000 KHz allocated to radiolocation.