Regulators mull indoor/outdoor split for sharing

As we reported recently, UK regulator Ofcom is pressing ahead with its plan to share the upper 6 GHz band (6425—7125 MHz) between IMTInternational Mobile Telecommunications (I… and unlicensed use (including Wi-Fi).

It wants to open the band for unlicensed use by the end of this year and then introduce sharing in 2027, as the European technical agency CEPTCEPT stands for the European Conference of… should have produced a harmonised European proposal for sharing the frequencies by then.

Ofcom is proposing two sharing solutions that would eventually allow mobile to use the band: an indoor/outdoor split and a priority spectrum split.

The mobile industry is not keen on an indoor/outdoor split. Laszlo Toth, Head of Europe and CIS at mobile industry association the GSMA, described it as “weird” at a recent industry event and asked sarcastically what would happen if he opened a window.

Given that the majority of mobile traffic originates indoors, there is no clear rationale for attempting to enforce an outdoor mobile use of the band and an indoor Wi-Fi use of the band, the association said in a recent report.

However, in the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already adopted an order authorising low-power, indoor-only (LPI) use of the entire band (5925—7125 MHz). A recent paper compiled for the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance by New America argues that there is potential to authorise indoor-only use in many other bands. It claims that 7125—7250 MHz, 7250—7750 MHz, 3100—3450 MHz, 2900—3100 MHz and 10—10.5 GHz are all candidates for this kind of sharing.

Under the terms of Ofcom’s own shared access licensing framework, introduced in 2019, the 24.25—26.5 GHz band was only available for LPI use.

The pros and cons of indoor/outdoor spectrum sharing are one of the many topics covered in our Spectrum Sharing Dossier, the updated version of which was published last month.

The Spectrum Sharing Dossier is now available to Spectrum Research Service subscribers.