China Meets With U.S. on Spectrum
A Chinese delegation to a joint U.S.-China roundtable discussion on spectrum issues Wednesday claimed China is not dealing with the same spectrum capacity issues as the U.S. That’s because China has not “felt our pain yet,” Cisco’s Government Affairs Director Mary Brown said Thursday during a recap of the event for the Telecommunications Industry Association, which also organized the roundtable. “Here in the U.S. ... we are gobbling up spectrum at a rapid rate,” Brown said on the webcast recap event (http://xrl.us/bnooib). “They're a little bit behind the curve,” Brown said of China. “Their technologies tend to be more purely 3G technologies; they have not started deploying LTE technologies. So they're not yet feeling the pain that we feel or our colleagues in Europe feel when it comes to spectrum."
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While China says it has not experienced a U.S.-level spectrum crunch yet, its government knows that day is coming, Brown said. “They know that the next iteration of technology for them is going to use up a lot of spectrum,” she said. “And they need to position themselves if they want to be among the countries that are going to be innovating and leading in that space.”
Wednesday’s roundtable was part of an effort by the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade to discuss harmonization of spectrum, said Mark Uncapher, TIA’s director of regulatory and governmental affairs. Harmonization “opens up markets across the world rather than having these fragmented, individual markets,” he said. “It drives down the price of devices and the chips that go into the devices because you're able to use them in longer runs and more production, rather than in a targeted, specialized way."
The U.S., Canada, Japan and nations in Europe have opened up significant portions of the 5 GHz spectrum since 2003, while India and China lag behind, Brown said. That became a major topic of discussion at the roundtable, she said. “They need to pick up the pace and authorize more spectrum to enable what is going to be increased pressure on Wi-Fi overall,” she said of China.
Putting more spectrum online will be especially important as nations look to Wi-Fi as a way of offloading data from mobile networks -- something that the Chinese delegation was less familiar with, Brown said. “My impression ... is that there are far fewer public hotspots in China,” she said. “This is a new thing for them.” That lack of familiarity makes roundtables like the one held Wednesday all the more important, Uncapher said. “It’s important to have that dialogue so that they're familiar with the way we've built things out. It certainly can save them from making a lot of mistakes.”