SINGAPORE – A group of 23 multinational and smaller businesses – including Microsoft and a Canadian startup called 6Harmonics – have formed a new global alliance to promote regulatory policies for new spectrum sharing technologies that have the potential to address growing wireless data and digital divide challenges.
The Dynamic Spectrum Alliance will also focus on promoting laws and regulations to ensure that spectrum technology can extend rural broadband, support the development of smart cities and help ensure that consumers and their devices have wireless bandwidth when and where they need it.
As global demand for wireless connectivity continues to grow, the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance says that problems such as gaps in coverage and network overload in busier areas can be alleviated through spectrum sharing.
Part of the alliance’s mandate is to educate regulators about the benefits of dynamic spectrum access technologies, which can opportunistically exploit otherwise unused and inefficiently used radio frequencies (referred to as “white spaces” spectrum) – such as unused TV band frequencies – to create various forms of wireless connectivity. The technology is beginning to be commercialized, with technical trials, demonstrations and commercial pilots taking place around the world.
Here in Canada, Industry Canada and the Radio Advisory Board of Canada (RABC) held consultations in May on the department’s TV White Space implementation plan, following the government’s decision late last year to allow unlicensed devices to use TV white space.
“Whether you look at how TV white spaces are being put to use to serve underserved communities in Africa, or how the technology is creatively used in one of the biggest ports to lower costs, it is clear that it can have an immediate effect on people’s lives today,” said Pete Henderson, chairman of Kenya-based Indigo Telecom, a member of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance.
The alliance’s Canadian member, 6Harmonics of Ottawa, is a startup developing adaptive radio systems. Its proprietary GWS access platform uses OFDM-based cognitive solutions for wide area broadband wireless networks using unlicensed spectrum or dynamically accessing other authorized spectrum, which make it suitable for public safety and emergency communication, train to land communication, coal mining and oil fields communication, rural broadband communication, and municipal network and mobile hotspots.
The alliance says it will remain “technology neutral” and support a variety of technologies that will lower barriers to entry and increase the technical and economic benefits that can result from dynamic access to unused spectrum.
The companies which comprise the alliance are: 6Harmonics, Adaptrum, BSkyB, Carlson, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – South Africa, Computer and Communication Research Center – Taiwan, Indigo Telecom, InterDigital, Microsoft, MediaTek, Network Startup Resource Center (University of Oregon), Neul, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology – Japan (NICT), RealTek, Ruckus Wireless, Singapore Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), StarHub, Strathclyde Centre For White Space Communications, Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), Taiwan Institute for Information Industry, UhuruOne, WaveTek, and White Space Technologies Africa.
