Spectrum Economics

Spectrum Sustainability

Across the world, governments seek policies that increase the gross domestic product year on year. Humans link their prosperity to this continued growth. Continued growth demands increased resource consumption and this includes consumption of the radio spectrum - most especially in the 'sweet spot'. The sweet spot is finite. There is about 3.5GHz of spectrum available at the current state of art to support the majority of our communications demands.

Work under the programme of work completed by WP8F of the ITU-R suggests that the networks using the International Mobile Telecommunications or IMT standard will need around 1.7GHz by 2020. Existing services already occupy all existing bands in most developed countries though much is still reserved for military use. In developing countries, the occupancy is lower and the packing density of transmitters per MHz has room to increase significantly. Both developed and developing countries show convergence in spectrum demand over the coming years. The question then must be posed: if the spectrum is finite, how do we make more effective use of it to use for future services?

The answer is two-fold: by developing more efficient use and by tolerating more noise in the networks. Both come from technological improvement. Coding and efficiency in transmission is fundamentally limited by the Shannon limit. We must look for network efficiency through 'net system capability'. And we can already see improvements in the relative level of signal needed thereby allowing successful operation in presence of high noise.

InterConnect Communications has been in the forefront of understanding interference and in the estimation of spectrum for various network types in various environments. It has the capability to model the whole business of spectrum use in order to assure us all that we will still be communicating as the century rolls on.