April 2016

There has been a lot of talk lately about spectrum sharing – Spectrum Access Systems, Dynamic Spectrum Arbitrage, Environmental Sensing Capability, Shared Spectrum Access for Radar and Communications, to name just a few of the discussed approaches. The purveyors of these techniques believe that their technology will change the way spectrum is shared and will solve the nation’s unquenchable thirst for this finite resource. We have some reluctance about these high-tech approaches because they largely remain unproven. We’ve certainly never seen any one of them working in a commercially deployed wireless network serving 100 million plus customers; and we don’t think we will for some time.

But we have been thinking a lot about spectrum sharing, particularly in light of the FCC proceeding that proposes that satellite operations share spectrum with terrestrial mobile broadband services to advance 5th generation networks. In support of that proceeding, we recently collaborated with EchoStar – a premier broadband satellite company – on developing a sharing framework that will enable both satellite and mobile services to make intensive and productive use of valuable high GHz 5G spectrum resources in a manner that does not unduly restrict the development of either service. How? Not with some new-fangled technology with an acronym. We talked with each other to understand interference concerns and to develop a coordination framework that would work for both types of services. We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with the FCC and the satellite industry as we seek to formalize a set of rules to allow for the most effective use of the bands for both industries.