Spectrum managers have typically valued international coordination. Not only do radio emissions not respect borders, but a single country cannot possible demand enough radio equipment to push down prices to make them widely affordable. When these problems are successfully solved, and countries move together on spectrum management, great things can… Read more...

What is the best way of ensuring that vertical industries can get access to 5G spectrum? That is a difficult question which may not have a one-size-fits-all answer. Is the solution: Requiring MNOs to provide services to verticals (France in 3.5 GHz)? Local licensing in reserved spectrum (Germany in 3.5… Read more...

The ITU-R's Director, Mario Maniewicz, channeled the spirit of former US President John F Kennedy at the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance's Global Summit this week. "Ask not what spectrum and satellite orbits can do for you, but what you can do for spectrum and satellite orbits", he told delegates. His hope… Read more...

Spectrum policy makers and strategists often consider availability of equipment as a key input to their decision making. Verizon's high bids for licences at the low end of the 3.7 - 3.98 GHz, for example, was justified by globally available equipment for those frequencies. The reverse is also true; equipment… Read more...

The Canadian government has announced its decision to make available 1200 MHz of 6 GHz spectrum for unlicensed services, joining the US, Brazil, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica and Peru who have adopted the same policy. It is a major accomplishment for advocates of unlicensed spectrum, chief among them being the OTT… Read more...

PolicyTracker’s longest-running spectrum training course, Understanding Modern Spectrum Management is being held online on 13-17th September 2021. It will be taught in live three-hour sessions with trainers including Professors Martin Cave, William Webb and Gerard Pogorel, as well as Richard Womersley from LS Telcom and Martin Sims from PolicyTracker. Download… Read more...

Governments around the world are becoming more and more wary of Big Tech. Even the Government in their home country, the United States, is considering sweeping anti-trust rules that could even see some of them broken up. Different stakeholders attack Big Tech for different things, but one aspect of technology… Read more...

This week Parallel Wireless announced it will build a 4G Open-RAN network in Colombia using the 700 MHz band. The announcement adds to growing momentum behind the approach, as operators hope it will allow them to build better, safer, and cheaper mobile networks. As we set out in our Research… Read more...

One of the clear trends in the telecoms industry at the moment is operators' increasing interest in the use of Open RAN approaches to network buildout. The idea is to separate hardware and software components of Radio Access Networks and to standardise the interfaces in a network's architecture. This approach… Read more...

This week the FCC announced its plan to publish a Public Notice about implementing emission limits agreed at WRC-19 with respect to licences across the 24.25 - 25.25 GHz range. The spectrum was auctioned in Spring 2019, but later that year the World Radiocommunication Conference established much stricter limits than… Read more...