Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge, penned the poet contemplating societal dynamics, complexity and change. That was then, decades before the ‘wired society’ and novel telecom products and services. Fastforward to the here and now, and it’s plain that there’s scarcity of the available radio frequency spectrum for telecom services, such as cellular mobile.
As we envision and plan for over 700 million telecom subscribers by 2012 – mostly mobile users – what’s required is proactive policy for spectrum usage. Specifically, what’s needed is innovative spectrum-sharing arrangements and norms made possible by technical change, so as to make real policy sense.
The fact remains that seeming scarcity of spectrum is limiting the growth of myriad telecom products and services, mostly wireless. But then, the scarcity is largely because of outdated policies and obsolete wireless technologies. Traditionally of course, the policy of spectrum licensing was deemed essential for ‘interference protection.’
The result was that wireless systems got ‘exclusive access’ to telecom spectrum. But the fact is that such exclusive licensing is ‘highly inefficient’ use of spectral resources. Fortunately, recent technical developments such as mesh networks, location technologies and spectrum sensors do allow various forms of spectral sharing.
In the light of the technical developments, our spectrum policy does increasingly need to factor in spectrum-sharing arrangements especially given the exponential growth in telecom subscriber base likely in the foreseeable future.
What’s necessary is to policy induce the most cost efficient and effective spectrum sharing across the board in telecom For value-added services such as third (3G) or fourth generation mobile services, there’s a case for auctioning spectrum. But here again, there is scope for spectrum-sharing in 3G.
Additionally, there may be further scope for dynamic auction of spectrum, between a ‘primary’ spectrum user and one or more ‘secondary’ users. The current approach of administratively allocating wireless spectrum, with much controversial give and take involved, results in poor utilisation of this scarce resource. It would be better to allow for spectrum to be allocated on a finer scale both in time and space, by proactive market design, such as a “real-time spectrum market.” We need to have in place active markets and platforms for wireless spectrum.
In such a dynamic spectrum sharing scenario, a licensee may wish to lease spectrum to umpteen secondary users. The objective is to segment a band that is licensed into distinct ‘bundles.’ The idea is to make way for mutually beneficial ‘band trading,’ so as to make better use of unutilised spectrum at any given time and place.
Also, within a given spectrum band, there may be the possibility of different sharing arrangements, with various primary-secondary user mechanisms to rev up spectrum usage. For all such primary-secondary sharing possibilities, there needs to be technical and regulatory assurance that the primary system would not experience disturbing interference.
As we envision and plan for over 700 million telecom subscribers by 2012 – mostly mobile users – what’s required is proactive policy for spectrum usage. Specifically, what’s needed is innovative spectrum-sharing arrangements and norms made possible by technical change, so as to make real policy sense.
The fact remains that seeming scarcity of spectrum is limiting the growth of myriad telecom products and services, mostly wireless. But then, the scarcity is largely because of outdated policies and obsolete wireless technologies. Traditionally of course, the policy of spectrum licensing was deemed essential for ‘interference protection.’
The result was that wireless systems got ‘exclusive access’ to telecom spectrum. But the fact is that such exclusive licensing is ‘highly inefficient’ use of spectral resources. Fortunately, recent technical developments such as mesh networks, location technologies and spectrum sensors do allow various forms of spectral sharing.
In the light of the technical developments, our spectrum policy does increasingly need to factor in spectrum-sharing arrangements especially given the exponential growth in telecom subscriber base likely in the foreseeable future.
What’s necessary is to policy induce the most cost efficient and effective spectrum sharing across the board in telecom For value-added services such as third (3G) or fourth generation mobile services, there’s a case for auctioning spectrum. But here again, there is scope for spectrum-sharing in 3G.
Additionally, there may be further scope for dynamic auction of spectrum, between a ‘primary’ spectrum user and one or more ‘secondary’ users. The current approach of administratively allocating wireless spectrum, with much controversial give and take involved, results in poor utilisation of this scarce resource. It would be better to allow for spectrum to be allocated on a finer scale both in time and space, by proactive market design, such as a “real-time spectrum market.” We need to have in place active markets and platforms for wireless spectrum.
In such a dynamic spectrum sharing scenario, a licensee may wish to lease spectrum to umpteen secondary users. The objective is to segment a band that is licensed into distinct ‘bundles.’ The idea is to make way for mutually beneficial ‘band trading,’ so as to make better use of unutilised spectrum at any given time and place.
Also, within a given spectrum band, there may be the possibility of different sharing arrangements, with various primary-secondary user mechanisms to rev up spectrum usage. For all such primary-secondary sharing possibilities, there needs to be technical and regulatory assurance that the primary system would not experience disturbing interference.
Already, such emerging technologies like cognitive radio systems are based on the assumption that wireless handsets “fully co-operate” to reduce interference even if the devices are operated by multiple service providers.
The point is that the seeming overwhelming demand for wireless devices calls for overhaul of the extant spectrum policy to explicitly allow sharing. It cannot be gainsaid that exclusive access to blocks of spectrum for service providers has quite eliminated the possibility of interference, disturbance and congestion.
But the evidence is that most ‘prime spectrum’ remains idle as and where the license-holder is inactive. A few bands have indeed been designated for unlicensed, low-power devices so as to rev up spectrum usage and limit interference. But the increasing diffusion of wireless handsets does require corresponding policy change to actively support a quantum leap in the demand for telecom usage. Hence the need for spectrum-sharing policy space.
The way ahead is to incentivise innovative spectrum-sharing solutions to minimise or even avoid interference. Such a forward-looking spectrum policy would induce handset makers and designers to suitably reduce network congestion even while making possible the sharing of spectral overheads. It should result in substantial cost saving, which in turn would mean considerable scope to bring telecom prices pan-India, already the lowest anywhere.
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