EXPERTS SAY MORE UNLICENSED CAPACITY IS NEEDED IN LOWER BANDS

Anthony Townsend, founder of NYCwireless.net, a nonprofit group that has placed free hot spots in 10 N.Y.C. parks, said wireless policy needed to address groups such as his, which he called “grass-roots enthusiasts.” He said the U.S. had “lost the lead in wireless technology -- anyone who tells you differently doesn’t know what they are talking about.” Townsend said it wasn’t a question of engineering, because the U.S. continued to develop the new technology. “I think in terms of application and cultural acceptance of new technology we are very far behind countries such as South Korea, Japan and Finland,” he said.

A prevalent misconception is that spectrum is anything other than what is created by actually transmitting radiation, said Gilder, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. “The second misconception is that transmissions interfere with one another,” he said. Interference at a receiver can briefly cause wild variations in the power of the signal received, but they aren’t permanent variations, he said.

“The very essence of electromagnetic radiation is that it can be shared,” Gilder said. “The big problem of policy today is that the government focuses on preventing interference -- this ‘mystical’ phenomenon -- rather than promoting sharing, which is the natural fulfillment of the properties of electromagnetic radiation.” He touted the ability of cognitive radios, or software defined radios, to harness larger swathes of spectrum much more efficiently than current technology such as cellphones, which use 30 kHz in a particular band. Cognitive radio technology lets a system listen before transmitting, letting it move into bands that aren’t being used, Gilder said. “We essentially treat spectrum as if radios are dumb and blind,” he said. However, he said, smart radios can negotiate spectrum channels much as drivers do on a highway, by watching others and switching roads as long as speed and other rules are obeyed.

While he and other panelists didn’t rule out a continued role for licensed spectrum, particularly as new technologies developed in the near term, Gilder touted the FCC’s unlicensed Part 15 regulations for spectrum such as 2.4 GHz as a model for the future. Otherwise, he said, federal spectrum regulations have “taken something naturally unlimited and rendered it scarce. This has been the great error. Ever since the beginning of radio, the government has seen a public resource or an endowment subject to dire interference and perennial peril that regarded spectrum as a domain of limits to be husbanded and allocated and protected by bureaucrats.” As for the international impact of U.S. policies on broadband and spectrum, Gilder said South Korea had 40 times more effective bandwidth per capita than the U.S. That country processes 1/3 of its economic transactions over the Internet, compared with only 1% in the U.S., he said.

Several panelists noted that the past 18-24 months, ideas such as smart radios and spectrum sharing had taken a dramatically higher profile at the FCC and elsewhere in the govt. Even a year ago, such ideas would have been viewed as “pretty oddball” in Washington, said founder Kevin Melcher of Supernova consulting. He also stressed that federal policy should focus not on minimizing interference but on maximizing usable spectrum capacity. In a paper, Melcher said spectrum policy should: (1) Continue to identify more spectrum for unlicensed use, particularly at frequencies below 2 GHz, where transmission can better penetrate obstacles such as trees. “Contrary to the recommendations of the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force, new unlicensed allocations should not be limited to spectrum above 50 GHz,” he said. (2) Advance a proceeding recently opened on potentially allowing unlicensed users to operate on a noninterference basis in broadcast spectrum. “The interference temperature concept outlined in the FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force report is promising but undeveloped,” he said, and clearer boundaries are needed to divide high-power licensed and low-power unlicensed services in the same bands.

(3) Allow more “opportunistic sharing” of spectrum, including letting underutilized bands be used by noninterfering systems. (4) Focus on experimentation and research, in part by ensuring that unlicensed spectrum rules allow for broader experimental authorizations, including the possibility of using a block above 50 GHz for such purposes.

Many experts stressed the need for more unlicensed spectrum, with Kevin Kahn, Intel dir.-Communications Technology Lab, citing the fast rise of Wi-Fi in just 85 MHz of spectrum. “If 85 MHz managed to do that, what would 850 MHz do for us?” he asked. But he warned against setting too many rules too soon for unlicensed bands, including etiquette standards to help users avoid interference. “There may be some etiquettes we need over time, but it’s a little early to be out there already trying to figure out how to put the handcuffs on what we've got. Let’s get a little more experience here before we all panic.”

Kahn also raised concerns that the same incumbents that fought opening spectrum to ultra-wideband (UWB) devices based on interference concerns “could continue to put pressure on regulators here in the U.S., where it has been made legal, and even worse in the rest of the world, where it is still under consideration, to back away from it.” He said it was important to “hold the line” on UWB progress the FCC had allowed by legalizing the technology. But he also said that FCC must make decisions faster to keep up technology. The FCC decision on UWB took 4 years, he said. “In semiconductor terms, that was something a little bit over 2 and a half generations of process technologies,” he said. “There is a bit of a mismatch in the speed at which these things move.”