‘To be vertical, you have to be perpendicular to something’
Around the world, regulators are exploring various strategies to spectrum management that makes room for private network allocations. At the recent Private Networks European Forum event, representatives from regulatory agencies in the U.K. (Ofcom), Sweden (PTS) and Germany (Federal Network Agency, or BNetzA) discussed their respective approaches to spectrum allocation for private networks, both as individual countries and in a pan-European context.
In this three-part series, each country’s private network spectrum strategy. See Part 1, which details the strategy of Ofcom in the U.K., here. Part 3, focusing on Germany, is here.
PTS of Sweden: Does enabling private networks look like proliferating licenses, or a new carrier-based service?
Jonas Wessel, director of the resource management department at the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), said that as Sweden began looking at spectrum for 5G and verticals, it saw an emerging trend: Demand for spectrum access from what he described as a “non-national, non-monolithic, non-operator base, non-your-normal-type-of-mobile-services. … We saw it from different trade organizations in … real estate, mining, transport and many of those as defined as verticals. I have to repeat what I’ve said many times is that, well, to be vertical you have to be perpendicular to something—and I think that they’re all seeking access to spectrum to provide a service.”
Wessel noted that the Radio Spectrum Policy Group (RSPG), a high-level advisory group that helps the European Commission develop radio spectrum policy and which he chaired from 2018-2019, identified multiple ways for such parties to get access to spectrum: Through unlicensed use, for example, or by being a customer of an operator who owns spectrum licenses. But there was also demand for “somewhat exclusive” use by verticals, he said. As a regulator, he offered, “Our job is to maximize societal value of the use of spectrum over time, and … trying to satisfy any demand in the market, is one way of looking at it.
“There was a demand to [establish] your own networks, [whether] they’re private or something else, and also actually to promote innovation, and sort of propel digitalization to … see what happens if we do this,” he added.
As a result, Sweden looked at how it could lower entry barriers and harmonize spectrum. While the country has made traditional spectrum licenses available to its mobile network operators, it also reserved midband spectrum at 3.7 GHz and some millimeter wave spectrum at 26 GHz for local and regional licenses. In designing private network licenses, he said, boundary conditions such as license size and output power are important factors. If local licenses are too big, more companies would have to compete for them and that might result in having to auction them—which, he added, wasn’t how Sweden wanted to do it. “What we tried to do was to make the licenses small enough and attractive enough to be in abundance, so you can actually do first-come, first-serve on that level.”
Sweden began accepting applications for local license use late last year.
Wessel said that PTS aimed for “very simple rules [and] very low fees” for that spectrum, but that it has “had not a very large pick-up of this” private network spectrum. In particular, he said that demand for the 850 megahertz of airwaves at 26 GHz “has been virtually zero or approaching zero.” But, he continued, the lack of immediate demand for individual licenses isn’t the most salient assessment of the private network market in Sweden: “It doesn’t really matter. We have opened [the spectrum]. It’s up, and we have lowered entry barriers to these bands. I think that’s really the important takeaway here, because what we’ve seen in the Swedish market is that our national operators, they have started advertising and packaging private networks as a part of their service offering into the market.”
And PTS does see increased interest from verticals such as healthcare, mining, transportation and others in exploring the replacement of legacy Wi-Fi solutions with LTE or 5G radios, he said, even if that doesn’t necessarily show up yet as individual license applications. “By lowering entry barriers, we have enabled new types of services in the market and I think that that sort of very good thing to happen as a bit of a byproduct,” he said. “[This is] really to lower enter barriers, and we are really happy to introduce that into the market.”
For more insights on private networks or to view the entire European Spectrum Briefing session, check out the Private Networks European Forum.
