Wireless Industry Doing ‘Extraordinary Job’ on Spectrum Efficiency, CTIA Study Claims
Wireless companies are “doing an extraordinary job” of maximizing spectrum efficiency but are reaching the upper limits of their capacity, a CTIA-funded research paper said (CD May 5 p14). “By every relevant measure, the U.S. wireless industry uses this spectrum extremely efficiently, not only approaching the theoretical limits of what physics allows, but with what is practically achievable with respect to deployment,” study author Peter Rysavy said in his report, filed Thursday by CTIA in dockets 09-51, 10-235 and 10-237. Wireless companies have had to “bankroll new network technologies every three or four years, on average,” but have multiplied their networks’ capacity by a factor of 4,708 since 1985, Rysavy wrote: “Unfortunately, the continual advances in spectral efficiency the industry has been able to achieve will not be able to persist forever due to fundamental constraints of physics expressed in the Shannon Bound,” the “theoretical limit on the bps/Hz that can be achieved relative to noise.”
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Rysavy’s paper was released shortly after CTIA Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe participated in a wide-ranging debate over incentive auctions with NAB Vice President Chris Ornelas and broadcasters’ consultant Uzoma Onyeije at the Brookings Institution. Onyeije and Ornelas each repeated their calls for a complete spectrum inventory before moving ahead with an auction plan, which Guttman-McCabe called “a delay tactic.” “I don’t think it’s a delay tactic to ask how that spectrum is being used,” Ornelas said. “Once we go down this road … there’s no going back. We get one bite at this apple.”
Ornelas said he was most upset about the use of the word “voluntary” in the incentive auctions policy. Guttman-McCabe conceded that broadcasters who opt not to auction their spectrum will have to be “repacked” to accommodate wireless companies. “How many viewers is it okay to lose?” Ornelas asked. Some broadcasters are still smarting from the failed promises of being made whole by the DTV transition, so they should be forgiven if they're skeptical of similar promises in incentive auctions, Ornelas said.
Guttman-McCabe said he would be happy to discuss the impact of repacking spectrum for broadcasters who opt out of the auctions if his opponents would promise not to stand in the way of incentive auctions proposals. But he said the wireless industry is united in its belief that it’s going to need much more spectrum to help roll out next-generation wireless. He said wireless offers the best bet to help close the so-called “digital divide” because African-Americans and Hispanics are adopting wireless broadband technology at higher rates than whites. When asked by a reporter how freeing up spectrum in New York City would help bring high-speed broadband to Alice Acres, Texas, Guttman-McCabe said: “You want a band of spectrum that works across the U.S. because our customers are mobile.”
On the panel, Matthew Hussey, aide to Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said he was worried that incentive auctions will become “the path of least resistance” and that Congress will assume it has solved the nation’s spectrum problems by passing the legislation. Nonetheless, he said after Thursday’s panel that he was “cautiously optimistic” that D-block and incentive auctions could be moved as part of legislative package soon.