PCAST Calls for Sharing to Meet Growing Spectrum Demands

"It’s now time to accelerate the movement toward sharing,” said Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, who presented the report. “We believe that there’s a much more efficient use of federal spectrum that can be obtained through sharing.” Industry officials told us the report has sparked interest in the White House, with the preliminary conclusions presented directly to Obama.

The U.S. faces “pressing, almost crushing demand” for spectrum that can’t be met under the current model for how spectrum is allocated, said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, who co-chaired the group that wrote the report. “We can’t create any new spectrum, just like we couldn’t create any new land,” Mundie said. “We have to have some way of coming back and finding a better land use model.”

The report backs creation of a spectrum access system in the U.S., ranking users of spectrum -- from primary users with the highest priority access to secondary users with more limited protections to tertiary users who would use spectrum on an unlicensed basis, based on a geolocation database, Gorenberg said. “The rules of the road for that” would be “sort of very similar to the way DNS servers work today in interconnecting the Internet, getting better use out of that,” he said. The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee is examining similar conclusions and the need for a more sophisticated model for spectrum rights in a world where sharing is more common (CD March 2 p1).

Sharing is now more possible than ever as a result of cognitive radio and smarter antennas, Gorenberg said. Use of smaller cells also is critical, he said. “They allow you to go down to very small geographies at low power, higher frequencies, and basically allow you to get very good geographical reuse of that spectrum.” Gorenberg also discussed the importance of smart receivers.

Gorenberg offered a negative take on the likelihood that large amounts of federal government spectrum will be cleared for commercial use, rather than shared. He cited NTIA’s recent report on the 1755-1850 MHz band. “Their report concluded that it would cost about $18 billion, take over 10 years and cause significant disruption to the federal agencies if they were going to clear it and reallocate it,” he said. “In fact, over the auctions since 1994, which generated about $53 billion, only about $5.3 billion net of that has come from auctioning federal spectrum.”

The report also finds “it’s time to create a new spectrum architecture,” Gorenberg said. “To basically look to divide that spectrum from small fragmentation to very large blocks, to be able to start to put the systems together that can coexist together well in those bands for better capacity use, instead of just by frequency.” The architecture could be based on geography, time, code or modulation, he said. “There’s a lot of different dimensions that can be used over time to make that more efficient and allow good sharing by federal users with commercial users,” he said. “In concert with that, we think we also need to go to a new set of metrics to measure the effectiveness.” Gorenberg said the report offers some analysis in that area. “We think that that can increase … the effective capacity impact of [spectrum] by a thousand times or more,” he said.

The report makes some recommendations for immediate action, Gorenberg said. It urges making a few bands of federal spectrum available for “general authorized access,” akin to unlicensed use. “One band that is talked about by many and that we recommend is to look at the 3550-3650 [MHz] band, which is primarily used by naval radar,” he said. Gorenberg said the same companies that develop devices that use the TV white spaces could find a new market using the white spaces in these federal bands.

The report also backs a special committee within PCAST to examine spectrum sharing, Gorenberg indicated. “We don’t propose to have the answers but we do propose to post some questions” so “industry can really move forward and start to move from concept to implementation.” Building on the concept of test beds in spectrum bands, the report proposes the designation of a “test city” for sharing and a mobile test service. The report recommends creation of a spectrum management team within the federal government “to move this idea of sharing federal spectrum forward,” Gorenberg said.

The report suggests federal agencies need more incentives to come to the table to discuss bands that can be shared or reallocated, Gorenberg said. “One of the biggest holes that we found … is that the agencies do not have an incentive to sort of move forward,” he said. Some suggest that agencies should have to pay for the spectrum they use, he said. “We think a carrot approach is a much better approach,” he said. Under that approach, agencies would get money back for giving up or sharing spectrum through a “spectrum efficiency fund.”

The report also said the spectrum crunch is real, Gorenberg indicated. “The worldwide mobile device growth opportunity that we see today will just be dwarfed by what we expect by 2020,” Gorenberg said. “We see this huge machine-to-machine wave, if you want to call it the Internet of things, that in 10 years we think will be about the same size” as the amount of spectrum used today, he said. “Some industrial companies believe it will be even more."

The report is a good starting point, said William Press, PCAST vice chairman, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin. “It provides both a distant vision of where we want to go and also an immediate path forward so that it’s not just another report lost on the stack of reports,” Press said. But he questioned why the report puts so much emphasis on registration of unlicensed spectrum users rather than sensing or creating unlicensed bands by rule. “The great success story that we have in front of us is Wi-Fi, which is, of course, licensed by rule,” he said.

Rural Cellular Association President Steve Berry said shared spectrum is no substitute for licensed spectrum. “I think it is all well and good that the administration wants to begin the discussion of spectrum sharing -- very few people in the private sector would be opposed to the discussion,” he said. “I don’t really know what their definition of spectrum sharing means, but I think that we should not lose sight of the primary responsibility of the NITA, FCC and the policy makers -- that is to find more spectrum now, to deploy new services on now and find a way to make more efficient use of currently available spectrum now. I hope the new discussion does not divert attention to the primary and immediate goals.” NTIA and the FCC also need to perform a comprehensive spectrum inventory “to thoroughly understand where every single megahertz of spectrum is assigned, to what function is it assigned, if the spectrum is currently being used, who uses it and how efficiently,” Berry said. “Before you can have a real discussion of spectrum sharing, you need to know what spectrum you are talking about.”

Communications lawyer Andrew Schwartzman said the report follows a growing trend. “This is one more indication that public policy is increasingly recognizing that more efficient use of spectrum will have to be a centerpiece of spectrum policy,” he said. “Just this week, the FCC endorsed a spectrum sharing mechanism to facilitate important medical technologies. High level endorsement of spectrum sharing doesn’t do much by itself, but it is one element of the emerging consensus."

"As the chairman recently mentioned in his CTIA speech, innovative approaches to spectrum will be essential to meeting the nation’s capacity needs,” an FCC spokesman said in reference to commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, in reaction to the report. “Three very important trends the chairman has emphasized are ‘white spaces’ databases, spectrum sharing, and the move to small cells. All of these concepts appear to be integral to the PCAST proposal. We commend the PCAST on their efforts and are very eager to read the full report once it becomes available.” Industry observers saw the report as mostly positive.

"The PCAST report is encouraging in its recognition that sharing of government spectrum should be accelerated,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May. “It is true that it is possible to envision development of a system in which agencies are incentivized to share spectrum either through paying for the spectrum they are assigned or being compensated for sharing their assigned spectrum. But, in the meantime, you would think just a good dose of firm presidential leadership … would yield some results. Without such leadership, the whole idea will be committee'd to death."

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood also found the report encouraging. “Spectrum sharing benefits everyone, not just one class of carriers or customers,” he said. “It’s an essential piece of any intelligent policy going forward, and a critical component to providing better opportunities for a wide range of users: incumbent wireless providers, government agencies, Internet entrepreneurs, community broadband networks, and machine-to-machine systems, to name just a few. Most of all, sharing is the most promising way to utilize spectrum fully, grow the economy, and serve the public interest."

"The major problem with spectrum policy is bridging the gap between where we are now and where we will be, in terms of practical technology, twenty years in the future,” said Richard Bennett, senior research fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “Early indications suggest that the PCAST report is fair overview of the emerging technology landscape that may be a bit light on the details. Big ideas about new architectures, re-allocating spectrum in larger chunks, and re-thinking traditional systems such as radar have a great deal of merit, pending practical means of implementation."

Carriers had little early reaction, though AT&T released a statement. “Although we have yet to review the report, we are encouraged by the interest in exploring ways to free up underutilized government spectrum for the mobile Internet,” AT&T said. “As President Obama recognized earlier this week with his Executive Order requiring government agencies to make services available on wireless devices, our world is becoming increasingly mobile. In order to meet the growing demand for mobile Internet services, it is vital that more spectrum be made available for mobile broadband use. We should be exploring all options to meet this important goal, including the sharing of federal spectrum when government use makes clearing and reallocation impractical.”