The New York Times
May 25, 2012
Presidential Panel Urges More Flexible Use of Spectrum
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — A just-completed report from a presidential advisory committee urges President Obama to adopt new computer technologies to make better use of a huge swath of the radio spectrum now controlled by federal agencies.
The shift, which could be accomplished by presidential signature — and without Congressional involvement — would relieve spectrum congestion caused by the popularity of smartphones, and generate far more revenue for the federal government than auctioning spectrum to wireless carriers, according to the authors of the report.
Making better use of the spectrum for cellphones would allow for more services, more competition and possibly lower prices for consumers using cellphone data services.
The new plan, which calls on the government to electronically rent or lease spectrum for periods of time as short as seconds using newly available computerized radio technologies, was presented publicly Friday to a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST.
The authors of the report included Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman of Google, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer and Silicon Valley venture capitalists Mark P. Gorenberg and David E. Liddle, among others. The report is scheduled to be presented to the president in June after final editing.
The idea of using computer-based technologies to increase spectrum capacity is catching on rapidly in the United States and overseas. Twice this month in speeches before cellular and cable companies Julius Genachowski, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, has called on industry to embrace spectrum-sharing technologies to make room for the wireless data explosion.
The report is a response to a 2010 memorandum by President Obama calling on federal agencies to find ways to clear 500 megahertz of spectrum to make way for the growth of new wireless services during the next decade. He believes freeing the spectrum will promote economic growth.
The authors cite a recent European study that found that freeing 400 megahertz of radio spectrum to be shared using new technologies would be equivalent to an economic financial stimulus of 800 billion euros.
According to Mr. Gorenberg, who presented the report on Friday before the committee, the amount of wireless data that has been transmitted by the growing legions of smartphones and wirelessly connected tablets has doubled every year for the last four years. He said that there would be as many as 50 billion devices transmitting and receiving wireless data by 2020, leading many in the wireless industry to forecast a spectrum crisis.
However, he said that the committee’s authors believed that agile radio technologies that make it possible for computerized radio systems to share spectrum on a vastly more efficient basis would make it possible to move from an era of scarcity to one of abundance. The central point of the report is that while there is no new spectrum available, new technologies can vastly increase the capacity of existing spectrum.
The report concludes that the radio spectrum could be used as much as 40,000 times as efficiently as it is currently and the committee recommends an approach that could increase capacity 1,000 fold, Mr. Gorenberg said. “We’re living with spectrum that is of a policy that was really set in motion by technology of 100 years ago,” he said. “That’s led to a fragmentation of the spectrum that has led to inefficiency and artificial scarcity.”
Except for several unlicensed frequencies established by the Federal Communications Commission that gave rise to data services like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, today much of the radio spectrum is licensed to both commercial users and government agencies who have no incentive to use the spectrum they control efficiently, he said.
The new radio technology was pioneered during the late 1990s and is described as “cognitive” or “agile” radio. Such computer-controlled radios inside a cellphone can rapidly switch the frequencies they broadcast and receive on based on an arbitrary set of rules. One analogy to describe the technology might be a freeway system, in which individual vehicles could quickly switch lanes or drive more closely together.
The report, which is titled “Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth,” calls for a tiered system in which different users would have different priority, possibly based on whether they were a government user, a user who was prepared to pay more for a higher quality-of-service,” or a casual user who might be assigned the lowest priority and pay the lowest rate. Unlike today’s unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, which can be used freely, the newly available spectrum would require devices “register” in a database that would then control the terms of their access to the spectrum.
“One of the reasons we think we will see this dramatic economic expansion around radio-based systems in the future is that we can have a dramatic lowering of the apparent cost of gaining access and that will be facilitated by the registration system,” Mr. Mundie said.
The report also calls on the president to create a “synthetic” currency that could be used to entice federal agencies into offering more spectrum to the system. “The agencies don’t have an incentive to move forward,” he said. “We think a carrot approach is a much better approach.” The proposed system would in effect increase an agency’s budget if it was willing to give up, or share its spectrum.
In response to questions after his presentation, Mr. Gorenberg said that foreign competitors were already aware of the potential economic value of the new radio technologies and that the United States was in a contest to develop systems quickly.
“I think this is a worldwide race,” he said. “There are people looking at this everywhere. This is something that is very important to the U.S. to lead here to have our vendors out front so they can export their products overseas.”
He warned that if the United States failed competitively, the nation would likely see a repeat of the situation in the early 1990s when advanced digital cellular standards were created first in Europe.
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