I have been asked to facilitate a workshop which will attempt to move the dialog along about spectrum sharing. The workshop will be all day October 21st at the National Science Foundation
It is one of the action steps that resulted from President Obama’s Memorandum on “Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution”, further discussed in a report produced by the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in July, 2012.
Over the last few months I have been meeting with members of the Wireless Spectrum Research & Development Senior Steering Group (WSRD SSG) to help plan the workshop. It has been a pretty exciting opportunity for me to work with such a talented and smart group of people. In addition I have learned much about the issues that need to be dealt with to make more spectrum available.
Background
Everything you use that is wireless needs to transmit using some part of the electro-magnetic spectrum.
When all we had was television and radio commercially, the fact that the government was using large parts of available spectrum for their purposes was not a big problem because there was lots of bandwidth and not so many users.
While the amount of usable bandwidth has increased due to advances in technology, the number of users (and uses) has exploded. Think for a moment about the number of wireless devices you use these days or may in the near-term future:
- Phones
- Tablets
- Laptops
- MP3 players
- Speakers
- Fitbits and/or wifi-enabled scales
- Cars (increasingly)
- Google glasses
And on and on.
The demand to use spectrum increasingly exceeds the supply.
One action step that is going on is the Federal Government is making available additional spectrum which is auctioned off to users, but that process does not seem to be enough to solve the problem.
Therefore there is increased efforts going on to share spectrum that is already being used by the Government. As you can imagine the policy and technology issues are complicated and not-so-easy to solve. The workshop tomorrow will focus on how the different participants can share enough information to enable greater sharing of spectrum. Privacy and security issues are among the difficult issues to review.
It should be a very interesting day.