As spectrum sharing becomes more mainstream (and necessary), intelligent monitoring is needed to support network management

Canadian network intelligence and monitoring firm thinkRF is seeing a number of challenges in the deployment of 5G networks in the 3.5 GHz spectrum band, according to Jonathan Morris, Director of Product Management at thinkRF. 

“We’re seeing lots of quality and deployment challenges…of 5G using the 3.5 GHz band. We see them at border regions between Canada and the U.S., between Hungary and Austria. We see them kind of anywhere. And then inside the country as well. And then what we’re also seeing is as we deploy private 5G networks, you have a new set of private operators coming in, that are using that spectrum, conflicting with public operators and conflicting with other private operators,” Morris said during a recent interview with RCR Wireless News at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

With CBRS in the U.S., which is shared using environmental sensing and tiered spectrum access prioritization schema, “There are lots of issues that can crop up in that that need to be managed and understood, and dynamically readjusted,” he added.

Commenting on the steps through which the company turns the information on the use of spectruman outcome that will help an operator fix a specific problem, Morris said that thinkRF uses a more autonomous approach to build intelligenceRF management tools.

“The traditional approach with RF management has been take a RF engineer, take some diagnostic tools and figure out what’s going on. That’s a very static solution…—here’s what’s happening right now in this spot. Spectrum doesn’t work that way. It changes moment to moment, day to day. New people are deploying stuff today that wasn’t there yesterday. So your measurement yesterday is no longer relevant. And you can’t be sending an RF engineer everywhere in your network. So we take a more autonomous approach to it, building intelligencethe RF management tools, to offload the operators of that spectrum of those networks from having to always be involved, seeing the changes as they happen, so that you can react to them in real time,” Morris said.

Beyond managing CBRS and other existing shared spectrum bands, this is very important for the coming deployment of 6G. Based on the outcome of the most recent World Radio Conference, as well as other national- and international-level scoping of 6G, the upper mid band (7 GHz to 16 GHz) is the target range for wide-area 6G coverage; more specifically, WRC-23 identified 7.1 GHz to 8.4 GHz as a global candidate band. The issue is that these frequencies are largely occupied by incumbents and the timeline doesn’t necessarily lend itself to broad clearing, meaning spectrum sharing is the likely outcome. 

“So before we can get to the upper mid-band,” Morris said, “we need to figure out what’s the incumbent activityopen up that new spectrum, right? There’s lots of work that needs to be done and figuring out what are the satellite operators are doing, what’s the military doing with the radar, where are they operating, so that we can take that resource that’s being underutilized and reallocated in some intelligent shared fashion. There are discussions about opening up 6 GHz to more mobile and fixed wireless traffic and the 7.2 GHz band. There are a lot of opportunities to expand spectrum. And we’re going to be involved in in all of that,” he said.