The Spectrum Debate

Efficient regimes for spectrum management have been a research focus since the earliest days of radio communications, but the mix of technologists, lawyers, and economists that has emerged in recent years has produced a new and lively debate. Unfortunately, the different approaches and languages of these researchers have made communication difficult, and no solid conclusions have emerged. Traditional spectrum governance, long employed by the FCC, has had the goals of providing important services and protecting those important services from destructive interference. It has thus tended toward static long-term exclusivity of spectrum use in large geographic areas, often based on the radio technologies employed at the time of decision making. This has led to many successful applications like broadcasting and cellular, which can be cited as evidence by the proponents of spectrum property rights, but has also been criticized as inefficient in the overall use of spectrum. A recent report presenting statistics regarding spectrum utilization shows that even during the high demand period of a political convention such as the one held between August 31 and September 1, 2004 in New York City, only about 13 percent of the spectrum opportunities were utilized [1]. In addition to the static nature of such spectrum allocations, the inherent political and nonpolitical inefficiencies of government controllers also play a role in the poor spectrum utilization achieved [2]. The success of applications in the unlicensed bands (cordless telephony and WiFi being wellknown examples) has sparked a hot debate regarding how the spectrum governance employed by the FCC should be improved so that the new spectrum policy alleviates artificial spectrum scarcity, promotes efficiency, and also encourages innovation. However, this debate has very quickly gone past technical comparisons and has generated, as pointed out in [3], more passionate rhetoric than logic. As mentioned above, the proposals for new governance regimes fall into two broad categories: spectrum property rights and spectrum commons. In its broadest sense, spectrum property rights refers to a governance mechanism in which portions of spectrum are owned by individuals (or companies). Such portions can be traded to other parties through monetary transactions, or used exclusively, in a flexible manner, with not many technical constraints. The spectrum commons approach, on the other hand, advocates that spectrum should be considered ABSTRACT