Balancing spectrum incumbents with new users and mitigating signal interference are increasingly challenging

All around the world, CSPs are looking for access to more spectrum. In many cases, governments are responding; however, things like balancing incumbents with new users and mitigating signal interference are making the process of giving everyone the access they need challenging. As a result, sharing has become a significant component to government spectrum strategy. During a panel at the Private Networks Global Forum, panelist from the provided more insighthow the U.S. and the U.K. are facilitating spectrum sharing.

“Sharing is the only path forward,” claimed Joe Kochan, the CEO and executive director at National Spectrum Consortium in the U.S. He noted that spectrum wasn’t always the hot commodity it is today: “You started with anybody can use anything, licensing were handed out for free,” he said, adding that now, there is a growing need to relocate certain users to make room for others, and further, with models like CBRS and AWS, more users in the U.S. are sharing or are adjacent, both of which require strategies to deal with the resulting “technical ramifications.”

The U.S. government released the Biden Administration’s National Spectrum Strategy (NSS), a National Telecommunications and Information Administration-led plan that focuses on 7.1 GHz to 8.4 GHz. It acknowledges that dynamic spectrum sharing “key” to meet the growing demands of advanced systems such as 5G and 6G broadband networks, private wireless networks and autonomous vehicles.

Also on the panel was Derek Khlopin, who is deputy associate administrator in NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management, which is an agency of United States Department of Commerce. He shared that while repurposing and reallocating spectrum has worked in the past, such opportunities are “very few and far between these days” and is, in fact, only going to become harder to do. “So obviously, a natural solution is to find a way to share spectrum more. This can be the most granular dynamic spectrum sharing to more of these you take a band and carve it up different ways or you do a geographic exclusion. What we are trying to do … is to find ways to advance that sharing,” he said.

The U.S. currently has CBRS, a 150 MHz segment of the 3.5 GHz band established in 2015 that is part of the FCC’s three-tiered system for sharing the spectrum between federal and non-federal users. According to Kochan, it’s working. “Folks were able to come up with a framework, design new technology — SAS and its related technologies — onto the band to make it possible, prototype, test and deploy that technology and now put it out there for commercial use in such a way that CBRS has an active market, and in some ways underpinning the private network activity here in the U.S.,” he stated.

The U.K. government established the Shared Access Licence (SAL) framework in 2019, and as of March 2023, issued more than 1600 licenses across the four shared bands (3.8-4.2 GHz; 1781.7-1785 MHz paired with 1876.7-1880 MHz; 2390-2400 MHz, and the lower 26 GHz indoors). Ofcom’s Principal of Spectrum Policy Richard Moore told event attendees that many of these licenses are for fixed wireless access, others are being used to connect factories ports and mining facilities.

Moore called the 3.8-4.2 GHz band the “anchor band” for the overall spectrum-sharing strategy, commenting: “One of the advantages of being in that band … is that it’s adjacent to the band we’ve made available for 5G … so we’ve seen the equipment ecosystem start to bleed up,” he said, adding that Ofcom now expects to see a lot more take-up within this band. “[Spectrum sharing] solutions require a level of collaboration, whether that’s developing the technology to start with or when you deploy,” Moore concluded.