BOULDER, Colo. – With surging wireless service demand applying a greater amount of pressure on spectrum assets, the need to insure that those services are able to reach consumers through the noise has become a growing concern. This so-called spectrum pollution has arisen through the increased amount of services attempting to penetrate a fixed amount of unlicensed and licensed spectrum
Wireless industry regulators, lawyers and license holders gathered at the recent Silicon Flatirons Radio Spectrum Pollution event held at the University of Colorado at Boulder Law School. Attendees discussed a number of subjects concerning spectrum pollution, including how to measure for spectrum interference, scenarios in which spectrum pollution has impacted services and ways in which rules set up to alleviate interference can be enforced.
Julius Knapp, chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Engineering and Technology, provided a keynote address at the recent Silicon Flatirons Radio Spectrum Pollution event in Boulder, Colo., highlighting overall issues of spectrum pollution.
One of the topics that came up in the talk was that of LightSquared, which is embroiled in litigation with the GPS community concerning interference claims between LightSquared’s licensed 1.6 GHz spectrum holdings and communication with some ground-based GPS units. Tom Dombrowsky, an engineering consultant with Wiley Rein, noted that the ability for the GPS community to basically get the FCC to limit LightSquared’s access to its licensed spectrum despite the blatant issued being caused by rogue GPS devices has set a dangerous precedent.
“GPS thinks they came out of the LightSquared issue emboldened and are now asking for floor limits in AWS-3,” Dombrowsky noted in reference to FCC plans to auction spectrum in the 1.7 GHz band.
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