STUDY CHMN.: DYNAMIC MANAGEMENT KEY TO WIRELESS SPECTRUM POLICY
SAN FRANCISCO -- FCC study group plans to report in fall on reforming wireless spectrum allocation to avoid playing technology favorites and give market innovation running room, panel chmn. said Wed. Spectrum Policy Task Force needs to step back and consider similarities and differences among uses -- radio navigation, telephony, broadcasting, data services, public safety -- to devise integrated approach that didn’t impair research and product development, Paul Kolodzy told Wireless Congress here. He said FCC needed “quicker, more adaptive spectrum-management techniques.”
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Task force mandate is to: (1) Outline moves to market- driven process from traditional command-and-control. (2) Study innovation promotion. (3) Consider structural improvements in FCC coordination with NTIA. Kolodzy solicited business responses to public notices that will go out shortly, and said task force would hold summer workshops.
Wireless technologies present regulators with moving target, Kolodzy said. Frequency agility and wideband and ultra-wideband devices pose challenges at intersection of allocations, to FCC’s ability to keep up, he said. In general, device mobility continues to grow, with historically separate media-like voice and data converging. Transceiver density is increasing, with relevant ranges for evaluating interference plunging to feet and, in the case of cellphones, PDAs and Blackberries carried near each other, even inches, he said. Transmitters, too, are proliferating, undermining economic rationale for regulation, pushing design costs onto them rather than receivers, he said. Networks’ capacity is being tested continually, Kolodzy said, and it can be unclear whether spectrum is oversubscribed or overused, and answer may vary between urban and rural areas.
P2P networks increase capacity but at cost of greater complexity, Kolodzy said, and they indicate spectrum reuse can scale with number of transceivers. Next-generation, or “XG,” project at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is studying holes in available spectrum and their variations, he said. Flexible allocations and frequency agility point toward broader change to more dynamic spectrum management, he said. Flexibility is evident in technologies such as cellphones that switch among technology modes to operate in different regions, and agility is displayed by adaptive RF components under development. Kolodzy said challenge was to reap advantages of dynamic management rather than to promote chaos.