Frontiers in Spectrum Sharing

• Event Recordings
• Day One Keynote Remarks by Amb. Grace Koh
• Day Two Keynote Remarks by FCC Commissioner Simington
• Event Transcript
• Conference Outcomes Report

Radios have always shared spectrum, whether in frequency, time, or geography. However, President Obama’s 2013 Presidential Memorandum to Federal government agencies brought new urgency to spectrum sharing “… as a means of dealing with the finite nature of the spectrum and the growing demands for spectrum among commercial and government users.” Subsequently, on October 25, 2018, President Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum to Federal agencies that included, among other things, the declaration that “The United States Government shall continue to look for additional opportunities to share spectrum among Federal and non-Federal entities.” More recently, in President Biden’s first budget proposal to Congress, he called for increased funding for NTIA, which would “support the development and deployment of broadband and 5G technologies by identifying innovative approaches to spectrum sharing.”

Over the eight years between 2013 and 2021, and even much earlier, advanced and more encompassing spectrum-sharing options have been researched, advocated, and even adopted, but demand for potentially conflicting radio operating rights continues to grow. Therefore, the time is ripe to map the frontiers of spectrum sharing: in novel settings like outer space, in wireless engineering, and in the ways that spectrum sharing could be encouraged and governed.

Panel Discussions

The first panel will focus on broad issues associated with spectrum management of space-based systems. It will include discussions of difficult topics such as balancing commercial and public uses of the spectrum resource in space, the pros and cons of repurposing spectrum for different uses, advanced techniques for spectrum sharing between and among various space services, and domestic and international governance issues.

The second panel will delve into the technical aspects of inter-service sharing in the terrestrial environment. It will include discussions of hard topics such as the promise and challenges of new (or newly emerging) technologies such as massive MIMO techniques, the benefits of improved radio propagation models, and improving the capabilities of receiving systems to deal with adjacent channel and band interference.

The third panel will concentrate on less quantifiable questions, explicitly considering governance and incentives for spectrum sharing. It will include discussions of tough topics such as valuing competing spectrum uses (including those that are challenging to monetize), incentivizing government and commercial users to share spectrum, and techniques for resolving coexistence conflicts efficiently and quickly.

In the conference’s closing session, the three panel moderators will reconvene to identify the conference’s highlights, conclusions, and themes. Students at Colorado Law will prepare an after-conference report that will be published in due course.