The UK's regulator has had a frustrating couple of months in its efforts to assign the 700 MHz and 3.6 - 3.8 GHz bands. For a start, the Coronavirus pandemic has made it harder to get anything done, especially something as sensitive as a spectrum auction. In response to the… Read more...

One of the themes in our new Spectrum Auctions Dossier is the evolution of formats. The combinatorial clock auction has declined in popularity and recent years have been mostly been notable for minor modifications of an existing approaches. But there has been one truly revolutionary development: the incentive auction. The… Read more...

Recent news about spectrum auctions has focussed on cancellations due to the COVID-19 crisis: but underlying this there are bigger issues explored in our new Spectrum Auctions Dossier.  In the past 20 years auctions have become the go-to means of assigning spectrum, but they are being questioned as never before.… Read more...

Our Dossiers give an overview of current high-profile policy debates. We split the topic down to a handful of key issues, analysing stakeholder perspectives and identifying the key events which have shaped policy development. Each Dossier is a portal for our knowledge on the subject, highlighting new events as well… Read more...

1992 was an eventful year. The Cold War officially ended, NAFTA was signed, and the World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC-92) identified the 1980 - 2010 MHz and 2170 - 2200 MHz bands for both the satellite and terrestrial components of Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunication Systems. These agreements were somewhat… Read more...

The new iteration of the PolicyTracker Spectrum Database (PSD) takes into account over 10,000 MHz of new or changed national spectrum assignments. The COVID-19 pandemic may have put several imminent spectrum auctions on ice, but the first three months of 2020 had already seen an enormous amount of spectrum put… Read more...

Like Google, for Microsoft most of its business depends on internet connectivity and the two companies are staunch defenders of unlicensed spectrum as a guarantor of cheap and ubiquitous access. Compared to Google, Microsoft has fewer consumer-orientated standalone products such as home control and smart speakers but the Xbox -… Read more...

Google is known as a Wi-Fi advocate, but its spectrum policy ambitions go much further. Cheap and ubiquitous Wi-Fi supports its internet business, led by its domination of the search market, but Google has a growing range of products which use the same bands. These include Google routers; the Nest… Read more...

Amazon and Apple may both be more recent arrivals on the spectrum policy stage but their priorities are quite different as our two new Research Notes explain. Amazon is focussed on the unlicensed spectrum on which its devices, services and fulfilment centres rely. But it also has interests in drone… Read more...

When the world's regulators met in Egypt last year to discuss the agenda for WRC-23, it was widely thought that there will be a discussion of potential IMT identifications in frequencies between 3.3 GHz and 24 GHz. As with every compromise, not everyone got what they wanted. The satellite and… Read more...