I posted a few weeks ago about the Spectrum Sharing workshop that I was going to help facilitate.
The problem that the Federal Government is wrestling with is the increased use of wireless technologies, not just wireless phones and tablets but things like wireless insulin pumps and cars.
BTW, I was at a Cybersecurity Conference run by the wonderful Bob Gourley earlier this week where it was pointed out that someone who had a wireless insulin pump (or some other wireless medical device) will enter an area of conflicting policy when he or she has to work in a secure SCIF (an issue almost no one had on their intellectual radar even a few years ago).
In any event, there is only so much available electromagnetic spectrum available for such wireless communication and the demand is exceeding the supply (there is work going on to enable usage in currently underutilized or unused areas but there are significant technical hurdles to overcome). One area of activity has been for the Federal Government, which ‘owns’ a lot of spectrum to let go of some of it (usually then made available through an auction of some sort to commercial interests), though this has not been proceeding as quickly as some have hoped. A second area has been to explore how to share spectrum which the Federal Government only uses part of the time (often only a small part of the time).
There are lots of complications in doing this kind of sharing, much of which relates to how to make sufficient information available to allow the sharing to occur. For example, if the Department of Defense is using a piece of spectrum every now and then to manage some kind of military action, the last thing they want to happen is to make public which part is being used and when it is being used. Yet if they do not, it will be impossible to share it with commercial providers.
There have been a series of workshops sponsored by the Federal Government to try and work through those issues, the sixth one in that series was held in October at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA. Around sixty professionals from various Government agencies and key commercial participants were invited to participate. As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, I was fortunate enough to be asked to facilitate the workshop.
I had three takeaways from the conference.
First, the quality and seriousness of purpose of all of the participants was very impressive. I learned a great deal from my interactions as we honed the details of the individual sessions and during the all day event. If the hard problems that were put on the table could be solved purely by talent and passion, they would have long ago been solved.
Second, the problems unfortunately are hard to solve, though of immediate importance. We wrestled with how to take steps forward in each of our sessions and while, in my opinion at least, there was some progress there was still much work to be done. Hopefully the prioritization process relating to future areas of research activities will result in additional useful investigations.
Thirdm it will take determined, continuous leadership to bring these issues to closure. From my experience at the Department of Transportation, and across the Government, there is a tendency for many people to confuse articulation with implementation and to assume an overlap between motion and progress. If sufficiently senior leadership in the departments and agencies that touch on this do not keep this issue high on their radar (I suppose a tiny bit of ironic comment) the main result of these workshops will have been to hold the workshop. I choose to be optimistic about the possibility of positive results.
I again want to thank Paige Atkins and Rangam Subramanian, both at NTIA. The former for suggesting me for the role and the latter for allowing me to participate fully in the resulting workshop. It was a privilege.