Support Innovation through Access to Shared Spectrum

Support innovation through access to shared spectrum

"The hoarding of spectrum is a barrier to rural broadband" 

And the lack of price competitive wireless leaves Canada at a disadvantage with reduced business and growth opportunities. 

http://rspg-spectrum.eu/_documents/documents/meeting/rspg19/rspg09_278_erg_rspg_report_on_radio_spectrum_competition_issues_090604.pdf

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/wireless-auction-wont-do-much-for-competition-2014-01-13

Spectrum Auctions are anti-competitive.

"A monopoly-like situation in some frequency bands ... lead to a similar (monopoly-like)
competitive structure on the down-stream markets."

http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/rural-users-lose-when-spectrum-is-hoarded-experts/47863

Spectrum Sharing for mobile and wireless data services opens the market to new entry and greater competition.

Spectrum sharing can be based on:

- Separating the ownership of cell towers from wireless cell phone companies. With separate ownership of the cell towers all wireless cell phone companies would have access to all wireless spectrum bands.
The separately owned cell towers would sell bandwidth access to all wireless cell phone companies.

The biggest obstacle to the separate ownership of cell towers from wireless cell phone companies are incumbent cell phone companies who enjoy monopolistic benefits of their monopolistic ownership of frequency bands. It would be no small challenge to insure that possible centralized ownership of cell towers was not used to provide preferential access to one or more wireless cell phone companies.

AND/OR

- Improved roaming between hot spots operated by different operators of licensed spectrum and unlicensed "Wi-Fi" spectrum
Removing any need for centralized hot spot / cell ownership.

Some means to improving unlicensed "Wi-Fi" spectrum sharing

- Geographical sharing
"Advances in geolocation database technology are making it easier to exploit
spectrum sharing opportunities. Here databases hold information on the frequencies
available for sharing in different locations, known as white spaces. White space
devices query the database to determine suitable channel frequencies and powers."
- Increase the available "Wi-Fi" spectrum
- Dynamic Spectrum Access
"A licence exempt approach, such as that used by Wi-Fi, provides lower barriers to
spectrum access than a licensed approach."
"DSA approach could provide a useful complement to the use of Wi-Fi based on
licence exempt spectrum outdoors in helping maintain good outdoor quality of service
in high demand urban areas" and high power required for larger coverage in sparsely populated rural areas.


Benefits:
- Reducing barriers to spectrum access using licence exempt sharing:
Sharing spectrum within a band by different licence exempt (LE) devices can significantly reduce barriers to spectrum access compared to a licensed approach.
- Increasing the supply of spectrum: The sharing of existing frequency bands on a geographical basis to provide greater access to spectrum;

Limitations
- with geographical spectrum sharing additional effort to establish and enforce co-existence rules between existing spectrum users and new services sharing access to their spectrum
- possible tragedy of the commons whereby increasing numbers of users reduce the
overall quality of service provided for everyone.

DSA methods
- use “listen before talk” protocols with licensed spectrum similar to those used by Wi-Fi to avoid interfering with nearby white space devices
- hybrid approaches, combining both geolocation databases and sensing
- Intelligent antennas, that are able to accurately focus their energy between transmitter and receiver, could be used to reduce interference between users
- (most advanced) In the event that the spectrum available at a given location is non-contiguous, aggregation enables a device to combine frequency bands together into a usable carrier of sufficient bandwidth




http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/spectrum-sharing/summary/Spectrum_Sharing.pdf