If oil is black gold then spectrum is invisible gold, because without it operators can’t build the networks that we need to talk, text, and watch Charlie Sheen interviews in high definition while waiting in line at the supermarket. Senators Olympia Snowe and John Kerry have recently introduced the Reforming Airwaves by Developing Incentives and Opportunistic Sharing (RADIOS) Act in an attempt to get America up to speed with the rest of the world when it comes to wireless technology, and to ensure she stays competitive. The first task the RADIOS Act will try to accomplish is to build a single directory that lists all the spectrum currently allocated. You’d think that the government would have already done that by now, but it hasn’t. Despite President Obama asking the FCC, in March 2010, to free up 300 MHz of spectrum within 5 years, both the FCC and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration have failed to go to their local office supply store, pick up a copy of Microsoft Office, and make a spreadsheet to show who owns what and where there are potential gaps that can be auctioned off.
The LTE network that Verizon launched late last year uses 10 MHz radio channels. Clearwire has 2 blocks of 20 MHz channels, but it’s in the 2500 MHz band which doesn’t really propagate well nor penetrate buildings effectively. With the LTE Advanced standard due to be frozen this year, and with it a promise of download speeds that reach 100 Mbps while on the go and 1 Gbps while idle, it’s going to require up to 100 MHz worth of spectrum to achieve those type of performance figures. In Europe operators are still waiting to see how long they keep going with HSPA+ since they paid far too much for spectrum at the turn of the century, but even there, the 800 MHz band which was once used for television broadcasts is being made available country by country.
[Via: C|Net, PhoneScoop]