Gasping for Air

The FCC hs a mess on its hands with the current spectrum shortage. For the sake of national security and public safety, the wireless industry must come to the rescue.

In a recent discussion about the spectrum shortage choking the wireless sector, Commissioner Kevin Martin said the FCC needed to “get rid of the fiefdom mentality” that has exacerbated the crisis. Specifically, he suggested that over-the-air broadcasters and the U.S. Department of Defense, both of which are sitting on large swaths of spectrum that are underutilized or not used at all, could use a few lessons in team play.

But Martin won't criticize previous commissions for policies that made the fiefdoms possible. “You can't say they made mistakes,” he said. “Their decisions made sense at the time.”

Rather than dwelling on the legacy of his predecessors, Martin prefers to look to the future — despite its uncertain nature. He and fellow Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy hope wireless vendors and carriers will develop technologies and strategies to ease the spectrum crunch. Both believe that doing so is imperative in the wake of Sept. 11, when unprecedented call volumes overwhelmed wireless networks nationwide.

While the spectrum shortage is seen as a major impediment to the rollout of third-generation services, Abernathy and Martin are thinking more about national security and public safety these days.

“Our focus prior to 9-11 was on best practices, redundancy and diversity for wireline carriers,” Abernathy said. “What we learned from 9-11 is that consumers rely on their wireless phones, especially in an emergency. So now we're beginning to talk to the wireless carriers in the same way we have been talking to the wireline carriers.”

Abernathy believes the wireless sector's deep pool of engineering talent will find ways to squeeze more uses out of spectrum or develop ways to use spectrum that currently is considered unusable.

“We've hit a wall,” she said. “The availability of clean spectrum is practically nil.”

The scope of the problem goes beyond mere creative thinking. “We need engineers to go forth and propagate,” Abernathy said.

Martin agreed and said that smart antennas — which allow carriers to transmit and receive wireless signals more efficiently, reducing spectrum consumption as well as interference — will provide part of the solution. They could, for instance, be pointed at a busy highway during the morning rush hour — when those commuters who aren't shaving or applying makeup are likely to be on their mobile phones — and then rotated in another direction after the rush hour ends.

“It's a way to make existing cell sites more efficient, and it's less expensive than the cost of a new cell,” said Ken Hyers, industry analyst of wireless strategy for Cahners In-Stat.

The installation cost of a new cell tower — ranging between $800,000 and $1 million per installation — is seen as a major obstacle to the implementation of cell splitting, another potential remedy to the spectrum crisis.

An alternative is increased use of picocells. They're less expensive to deploy, don't require a lot of power and cover a relatively small area, which means they also don't eat up a lot of spectrum.

They also can be deployed on existing buildings. “That means you don't have to pop towers all over town,” said Tole Hart, senior analyst of wireless services for Gartner Dataquest.

Compression technologies that reduce the number of bytes transmitted by a wireless voice or data call also would help the spectrum crunch. And, Martin is bullish about ultrawideband, a wireless technology the FCC recently approved for commercial use that can be effectively deployed within encumbered bands. The technology finds small pockets of usable spectrum in a larger swath of encumbered bandwidth.

“It just jumps around until it finds what it needs,” Hyers said. “Suddenly, there's no spectrum drought.”

Martin and Abernathy both said the FCC understands that it, too, needs to absorb some of the burden in easing the spectrum crisis by developing policies that would provide for the flexible use of spectrum and create a vibrant secondary market.

“We need a system through which spectrum can be transferred more easily to the highest-value user,” Martin said.