Ever thought about how your mobile, smartphone, or WiFi works? Ever been frustrated when you can’t get a signal? Ever wondered when your hometown will finally hook up to superfast 4G networks?
To all of the above, the answer lies in radio spectrum. It’s not something most people are aware of most of the time – but it, and the way it’s managed, is responsible for so much underpinning our everyday lives.
In today’s world, so many new innovations rely on high-bandwidth communication that’s on demand, instant, available wherever. And that will only increase in future: think of music streaming, cloud computing, or the Internet of Things. And in that world, radio spectrum is economic oxygen.
But the wireless revolution means we are putting more and more demands on our spectrum. Mobile broadband is growing exponentially; doubling every year, it could soon reach over one trillion megabytes per month in Europe. Old ways of allocating spectrum can’t cope with that, and that’s a huge technical and political challenge.
The EU’s radio spectrum policy programme is our way of finding coherent and coordinated responses to deal with this. And today we launch one of the first initiatives within that programme – a proposal on “spectrum sharing” (basically, where two or more entities arrange to share a given “chunk” of spectrum).
Today’s proposal is an essential part of the solution to dealing with the wireless crunch – without interfering with existing rights or downgrading quality of service, but rather by using new technical possibilities to create a secondary market for spectrum rights.
And it’s not just any market, but a single market: ensuring that any kind of wireless device can work, wherever you travel in the EU.
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If we had ubiquitous fibre infrastructure underpinning the mobile world the pressure would be taken off, and mobile used for mobile people. The problem is that there isn’t the availability of good connections in many areas due to copper limitations on distance from exchanges and many rely on mobile access even though they are in fixed locations. The key to it all is a good connection to every home and business and fibre to every mobile mast.
Broadly good news. Ofcom in the UK has been pushing for White Space technology and I think that it could prove to be an extremely viable solution for extending broadband into rural areas. If similar methods can be used to improve existing networks then all the better.
Still it’s worth remembering that even wireless networks can only deliver good speeds when they’re first given access to higher quality fixed line networks, which is the problem that a lot of areas have (no good fixed capacity supply). But that’s another issue.. sort of.
Hi Neelie
Good share! I hope more people will discover your blog because you really know what you’re talking about. Can’t wait to read more from you!
Cheers!
I remember the TOIA report requested concrete actions in that field but the European Commission didn’t deliver.