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On November 13, 2012 a group of 23 technologists, policymakers, academics, and economists convened in Washington, D.C. to discuss wireless interference management. The roundtable was convened to evaluate a proposal by the FCC TAC (Federal Communications Commission’s Technological Advisory Council) receivers working group regarding interference limits policy, and to recommend ways to improve, implement and enforce such policies. Interference limits policies describe the radio environment in which a receiver must operate, in order to facilitate optimal trade-offs between receiver and transmitter performance when packing diverse services more closely together. The TAC receiver working group focused its recommendations on harm claim thresholds, an interference limits policy approach which sets the interfering signal levels that have to be exceeded before a receiving system operator can claim harmful interference.
Participants concurred with the prevailing view that complaints of harmful interference are only likely to increase as the wireless spectrum becomes more densely populated. Although working out the details of harm claim thresholds will take much more work, the group agreed that this approach was a step in the right direction that would allow for more wireless services to be more densely packed together.