Spectrum Sharing Necessary to Meet Administration’s Goals, NTIA Head Says
Spectrum sharing will be necessary to meet the Obama administration’s goal of finding 500 MHz for commercial broadband service, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling Monday at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The old method of clearing spectrum of federal users and then making it available for the exclusive use of commercial providers is not sustainable,” he told the Silicon Flatirons event. “We have moved the systems that are easy to move, and to continue this method of spectrum reallocation simply costs too much and takes too long. And just as important is the fact that the opportunities to find spectrum to which we can move the federal operations are dwindling rapidly."
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The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee’s (CSMAC) evaluation of the 1755-1850 MHz band has been hit by data release problems, but Strickling has said in the past that he’s “pleased” with the committee’s progress (CD Jan 18 p3). When CSMAC’s five working groups do release their reports on the band, they'll issue three types of recommendations for government systems on the band. CSMAC will recommend some government systems share spectrum with commercial entities in the same geographic area, Strickling said. The committee will recommend traditional relocation for some systems, such as point-to-point microwave circuits, that are “relatively straightforward to move” and that will work on available spectrum, he said. Others, including satellite earth stations and similar systems, can be protected by defining geographic exclusion or coordination zones while allowing commercial entry into that spectrum in parts of the country not affected by the zones, Strickling said.
The government should also consider allowing more flexibility in occupied spectrum, so it can be used more efficiently for higher-valued services, said Greg Rosston, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, at a separate presentation Sunday. Rosston is a co-chair of CSMAC, but said his comments at the event were his own opinion. It’s difficult to figure out the right incentives to encourage government users to more efficiently use their own licenses, because “these guys rationally don’t want to give up spectrum,” he said. “It’s not that they're bad, it’s not that they're dumb, it’s because the incentives aren’t there."
Rosston said a market-based fee might be one way to encourage more efficient government use of spectrum. “If you charge a market-based fee for jeeps and soldiers, they decide how many jeeps and soldiers they're going to use,” he said. “Well, they don’t have a market-based fee for spectrum, so they don’t have a way to choose how they're going to use it.” Spectrum sharing could be an attractive alternative in such a case, Rosston said. “From the government’s perspective, sharing might be better than selling it, because if I share it with users … I have clear property rights” that would allow a government agency to kick commercial users off the spectrum if its needs change in the future, he said. Government spectrum sharing might also encourage development of technology that would in turn prompt commercial spectrum license-holder to engage in spectrum sharing, Rosston said.