EU Commission asks telcos to share radio waves

The European Commission is pushing telecoms companies to share the radio frequencies they use for mobile and broadband services as space runs out for rapidly increasing Web use.

European economies must squeeze more out of the radio waves that carry mobile and Internet technologies if they are to cope with the huge growth in demand for data services on smartphones and tablet computers. More than 50 percent of all smartphone traffic is routed over Wi-Fi networks and this type of traffic is growing four to six times faster than that on mobile networks, the commission said. Companies that own parts of the radio wave spectrum after liberalization in the 1990s consider this capacity to be among their most valuable assets and many have been reluctant to share. Spectrum is a finite resource so it can carry only a certain amount of traffic. If you have licenses for adjacent blocks of spectrum, then you can carry more traffic. If your blocks are separated by a slice owned by someone else, you can't carry as much traffic.