The FCC’s Broadband Plan holds out hope for wireless engineers and entrepreneurs who advocate a different approach: they want to develop techniques that dynamically assign spectrum to users or apps as and when they need it. By Peggy Albright.
Everybody knows that wireless spectrum is finite and that exploding demand threatens the resource’s ability to meet mobile data traffic needs in the coming years. This threat went beyond the abstract and became tangible last week when Ericsson reported that mobile data traffic globally surpassed voice traffic in December 2009.
Ericsson said that mobile data traffic grew 280% during each of the last two years and that it will double annually over the next five years. Everyone is under pressure now to find ways to serve data customers effectively while protecting spectrum assets.
So there may be a chink of light in the FCC’s new national broadband plan, which recommends the adoption of spectrum access techniques that dynamically assign spectrum to a device in real time based on the user’s needs, available networks and bandwidth. The FCC states that such “opportunistic” or “cognitive” technologies can significantly increase the efficiency of spectrum use in both unlicensed and licensed bands and help free up spectrum for broadband data access.
“We think dynamic spectrum access is the only alternative we have,” said Preston Marshall, a cognitive radio expert who is director of wireless networking at the information science institute at the Viterbi school of engineering at the University of Southern California.
The FCC’s positive treatment of new spectrum use and management approaches is likely to draw substantial attention next week in Singapore, where the IEEE will host a global conference to discuss the study and commercialisation of dynamic spectrum access networks.
“A lot of people around the world are looking at what the U.S. does,” Marshall said.
Of course the plan is not yet a policy. The commission’s many and various recommendations have yet to undergo deliberation by Congress, government agencies, service providers, vendors and the public and any discussions of spectrum use will be contentious.
Dynamic spectrum access will find its first commercial applications in the use of unlicensed TV white spaces spectrum. In a partially finished ruling, the FCC now allows devices to access this spectrum via a combination of cognitive radios and geo-location tools.
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