Wireless spectrum driving new design approaches

Wireless spectrum driving new design approaches

SAN FRANCISCO--Consumer demand and the coming spectrum crunch aredriving a new era of innovative engineering and spectrum-sharingstrategies in wireless because the low-hanging fruit in spectrumallocation 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 venturecapital and a member of the President's Council of Advisors onScience and Technology (PCAST).

The council's report, issued in July of this year, recommended avariety of steps in the coming years to move spectrum from "scarcityto abundance." Over the years, the goverment has freed unused orunderused federal spectrum for commercial uses, and while morespectrum has been examined with this in mind, the time and cost toclear 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 newtechnologies, and that's not what the PCAST report said," Gorenbergsaid, speaking Wednesday (Nov. 7) during an appearance at OpenMobile Media Summit here this week. The PCASTspectrum report said use the evolution of white-spacetechnology, geolocation databases and small cell technology, canspawn 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 partby the sinking of the Titanic and the communications challengesaround that--were marked by noisy technology that needed to becarefully isolated. He used the metaphor of a single road dedicatedto single cars, instead of a broad highway with many cars.

"We (on PCAST) said, the technology of these devices has advanced somuch today that we can look at options," he said. A spectrum accesssystem would imitate this and be managed with something like anair-traffic control system."
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TAG:Wireless communications spectrum PCAST Mark Gorenberg bandwidth radio design wireless systems engineering electronics