Liberalisation
Spectrum Liberalisation
A current topic of policy debate is spectrum liberalisation, an approach to spectrum management which has been proposed as a means of enabling mobile operators to launch new services and technologies and promoting competition.
Essentially, liberalisation of spectrum means the removal of technology restrictions to enable new access technologies to be deployed within the same band or bands as existing and legacy technologies – for example, UMTS or HSPA could be deployed in spectrum bands where traditionally GSM, cdma or TDMA has been used.
GSMA-backed benefits
The GSMA believes that, in principle, spectrum liberalisation – particularly of the 900MHz band – would offer a number of benefits including:
- better rural and in-building coverage
- faster roll-out of mobile broadband
- more choice for consumers (read more on Spectrum Refarming)
However, there could be significant downsides if the implementation of spectrum liberalisation is not conducted carefully – particularly interference problems and losses in the benefits of economies of scale in equipment costs.
Benefit-led solutions
Currently, it is not clear how spectrum property rights would be defined and enforced, and this is essential to ensure that harmful interference is avoided.
A liberalised market that allows spectrum users to efficiently change technologies requires such a property right to function properly. It is also not clear if this right should be defined in terms of an emission mask/and or receiver protection (performance); and if this should be via measurement or calculation.
The GSMA believes that the benefits of implementing a spectrum liberalisation regime should be significantly more than the costs of implementing such a regime. We are currently working to gather empirical evidence about the costs and benefits of spectrum liberalisation as it has been implemented worldwide to help inform future policy decisions.
