TORONTO – Spectrum hoarders need to “use it, lose it, or pay” was the message from wireless broadband services providers who spoke Wednesday afternoon during the closing session of the 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit.
“Our challenge is there are people out there who hoard spectrum and don’t make it readily available for people who need it,” said Michael Stephens, vice-president of marketing for TeraGo Networks, a provider of business broadband and cellular backhaul services during the panel discussion about the next generation of wireless.
Stephens said TeraGo would like to see the enforcement of spectrum implementation. “As long as people are continuing to hoard spectrum and not utilizing it in an efficient way, it’s punishing all of us, consumers, businesses, etc.,” he said.
A brewing battle over the 3.5GHz spectrum band (Wi-MAX), in particular, was in evidence during the panel debate. Although TeraGo’s services don’t use 3.5GHz spectrum, Stephens said he supported the position that companies who don’t use their spectrum to deploy service should be penalized. “The infrastructure should be set up in such a way that if you’re not using it (spectrum), either use it, lose it or pay for it,” he explained. “Let’s find an economical and fair way to free it up for people who can use it and have a need for it.”
C.J. Prudham, executive vice-president and general counsel for satellite and wireless broadband provider Xplornet Communications said 3.5GHz spectrum is “desperately needed” to provide broadband services to rural Canada. “Unfortunately, somebody’s sitting on it,” she said.
Bell and Rogers own 75% of the 3.5GHz licences that were auctioned off in February 2004 and January 2005. Prudham said the two carriers (which hold it together under the co-owned, undeveloped, Inukshuk division) still haven’t deployed spectrum in that band eight years later.
Bruce Rodin, Bell Canada’s vice-president of wireless technology, said it often takes years for carriers to deploy spectrum and he pointed to the example of Verizon who has owned AWS spectrum licences for seven years and is only now deploying it in the U.S.
Prudham countered by saying that of the remaining 25% of 3.5GHZ spectrum in Canada – 8% of which is owned by Telus – only one percent has not been deployed. “You’re eight years behind,” Prudham said to Rodin. (Telus was represented on the panel by Brent Johnston, vice-president of mobility solutions, who declined to take part in the 3.5GHz debate.)
Rodin said Bell Canada’s focus is on the deployment of its Bell Mobility LTE footprint. “We don’t see WiMAX as a long-term viable technology,” Rodin said.
Adrian Mah, inCode Consulting’s managing director of business strategy for Canada, explained LTE doesn’t work on 3.5GHz spectrum, whereas WiMAX does. “Certain choices were made to adopt one technology path versus another path, and so 3.5GHz just kind of sat there,” Mah said. He added that the U.S. is looking at reallocating the 3.5GHz band to “small cell” networks.
That is an idea that interests smartphone chip manufacturer Qualcomm, said the company’s senior vice-president of government affairs, Dean Brenner. “Qualcomm sees small cells as crucial to meeting the mobile data challenge, so as a result we looked at our spectrum chart and saw 3.5GHz as being perfect. It’s great spectrum for this application,” he said.
Brenner used his opportunity to show off a small-cell transmitter that was about the size of a small book. “Especially in urban areas, there are only so many places you can locate cell towers, so we think a big part of the future is one of these,” Brenner said, holding up the small-cell transmitter in his hand. “You can see this has all the functionality of one of those giant cellular towers, and we think that these are going to proliferate everywhere.”
Prudham said the potential use of 3.5GHz spectrum in urban areas doesn’t change the fact that there is still a need to supply rural Canadians with broadband access. “We have 2.4 million Canadians without broadband access. That’s a problem.”
Furthermore, she argued there is a greater need for spectrum to meet rural users’ data usage, which is comparable to that of urban consumers. Prudham noted broadband users in both urban and rural markets typically consume 20GB of data per month. “The big difference is how do you get your broadband? In urban areas, the reality is that 20GB per month on average connects through a wire. In rural, spectrum has to support that 20GB per month (data usage) …which is a very important consideration that seems to get lost in our policy-making from time to time,” Prudham said.
To those people who may suggest there isn’t a good business case for providing broadband services to rural markets, Prudham said: “Xplornet focuses exclusively on providing rural broadband through fixed wireless solutions across the country. It is possible to do broadband in rural, economically, viably, profitably, as long as there is access to spectrum.”
