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Wireless spectrum driving new design approaches
Brian Fuller
11/9/2012 10:45 AM EST
SAN FRANCISCO -- Consumer demand and the coming spectrum crunch are driving a new era of innovative engineering and spectrum-sharing strategies in wireless because the low-hanging fruit in spectrum allocation has all been picked, an industry expert said.
"The easy stuff [in spectrum] has been cleared. Now it gets hard," said Mark Gorenberg, a managing director at Hummer Winblad venture capital and a member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST).
The council's report, issued in July of this year, recommended a variety of steps in the coming years to move spectrum from "scarcity to abundance." Over the years, the government has freed unused or underused federal spectrum for commercial uses, and while more spectrum has been examined with this in mind, the time and cost to clear the frequencies is now too onerous.
Share, share alike
Now, government and industry are focusing on bandwidth sharing.
"People assume that to do that, you need complicated and new technologies, and that's not what the PCAST report said," Gorenberg said, speaking Wednesday (Nov. 7) during an appearance at Open Mobile Media Summit here. The PCAST spectrum report said use the evolution of white-space technology, geolocation databases and small cell technology, can spawn a more efficient and effective use of spectrum, he added.
"You could really make tremendous headway toward sharing," he said.
He noted that the beginnings of spectrum allocation--sparked in part by the sinking of the Titanic and the communications challenges around that--were marked by noisy technology that needed to be carefully isolated. He used the metaphor of a single road dedicated to single cars, instead of a broad highway with many cars.
"We said, the technology of these devices has advanced so much today that we can look at options," he said. A spectrum access system would imitate this and be managed with something like an air-traffic control system."
Next: HetNets
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