Google’s Cerf calls for spectrum sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Open networks, open platforms, open application programming interfaces, open-source operating systems and open standards arrived at through open processes — those might seem to cover the all of the bases in the pursuit of open mobility. But Vint Cerf, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) chief Internet evangelist, proposed one more: open spectrum.

At his keynote at the Open Mobile Summit, Cerf — one of the sires of the public Internet at DARPA — said that new modulation schemes in wireless for the first time allow for the sharing of spectrum between multiple parties, which makes the long-held notion of a single operator-single license obsolete. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access, which is the basis of 4G technologies WiMax and long-term evolution, abandons the notion of a single wide channel and instead splits a band into multiple sub-channels or tones. By tweaking the technologies already in development today for multiple entities, the industry could make a huge leap forward in more efficiently utilizing public spectrum resources, Cerf said.

“The technology is at a point where we should allow multiple parties to occupy the same spectral space,” Cerf said. “We can make a lot better use of the spectrum than we are today.”
Cerf added that he wasn’t blind to the plight of the carriers that have invested billions at auction acquiring single-user licenses — arguably their most valuable assets today along with their networks. But he said some accommodation is necessary to change the way spectrum is allotted and paid for if the industry wants to take full advantage of the potential of what are very limited broadband resources.

Cerf had other ideas in his bag of tricks, which he detailed at the show. He called for a rethinking of the TCP/IP protocols that govern the Internet today, saying that they were designed for static wireline networks not for the highly transient nodes of the mobile data network. He even proposed using protocols he helped develop at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for communicating between planets. These kinds of delay-tolerant, or bundle, protocols were designed to enable communications between bodies not only great distances apart — a transmission between Mars and Earth takes 3½ minutes at their closest point — but also moving at tremendous speed.

“The speed of light — it’s just too slow,” Cerf said. “Then there was the problem of celestial motion. The planets rotate, and we can’t figure out how to stop that.” Those same protocols however have been used to link distant communities in Scandinavia, Cerf said, and are being tested by the military. There’s no reason why they can’t be applied to the equally difficult problem of mobile communications. “The mobile environment is very hostile,” he said. “It could take advantage of more resilient protocols than TCP/IP, which is very brittle.”

Cerf also said the industry needs to create better protocols for the ad hoc networking of disparate devices. He said he envisioned a world that moved beyond a user interacting with a single device at any given moment to one where that user interacted with an ensemble of devices, depending on his or her immediate needs. A subscriber walking into a hotel room, for instance, would see his or her phone automatically transmit its user interface to a hi-res television and synch with a desk-mounted keyboard. The idea would be that all radios could function in groups, coming together at one moment to solve a problem, then immediately decouple and come together in a different configuration to solve another. The problem is developing the right authentication protocols, Cerf said, so the devices you want to interact with are the ones you interact with.