THOUGHTS OCCASSIONED BY A MEETING OF SPECTRUM EXPERTS

Yesterday I attended a meeting of international experts on spectrum allocation and management that was organized by the Global Communications and Information Technology Group of the World Bank. I learned a lot, but found myself thinking about some of real basics, that I will share here. (The real results of the meeting witl be shared by the World Bank at a later date.)

Let me be even more pedantic than usual for a bit. The discussion focused on the allocation of frequencies to cellular telephone operators. In general, telecommunications regulatory agencies are involved in allocating frequencies to military, civil government, and commercial applications; to satellite communications as well as mobile telephones. I was surprised to find that in many countries, allocation to radio and television was under different legal statutes, and done by different agencies. The allocation of frequency bands is often (but not always) linked to operator licensing. The traditional approach to frequency allocation from the 20th century has been challenged by frequency hopping technologies that utilize the spectrum more efficiently for some applications, and by unregulated uses (typically low power) that are also appearing.

Is spectrum a scarce resource? The issue is perhaps at the root of government allocation processes. If spectrum is not a scarce resource there might still be a role for government, such as government’s role in defining road traffic rules. Road traffic works more efficiently if people all drive on the right side of the road (or all on the left), and if there are traffic lights and people stop on red. But the allocation of the right side of the road to drivers is not the same as the leasing of range lands to ranchers or the allocation of mineral rights to mining companies; it does not have the same implication of property rights.

Clearly spectrum is not a scarce resource in the outback of Australia, or the rural areas of most of Sub-Saharan Africa, or indeed in much of the South-West of the United States. In these areas there is not much electricity, not many mobile phones or radio stations, etc. Lets go a little deeper into the subject. In the middle of the night, when people sleep, if the transmitters are turned off, spectrum scarcity becomes less of a problem.

Spectrum scarcity is thus geographic and temporal; spectrum may be a scarce resource in some places at some times, but not at other places or other times.

The idea of spectrum as a scarce resource stems more from wireless than from wired communications. Sending information via wires (or fiber optics), does not reduce by much the ability to send information over other wires (or fiber optics) or by wireless. So if one were to put fiber optic cable to every room in every home, office and factory, there would be a lot of information capacity for everyone. (Of course, the spectrum on each fiber optic cable is a limited resource.) We are not going to have wires trailing from satellites to the ground, or from airplanes. There are applications in which wireless transmission, at relatively high power, would be needed. But in a fully wired world, there could be a lot less problem of spectrum scarcity.

Similarly, since spectrum scarcity is due to the interference of one transmission with another, the problem can be reduced by transmitting with very low power, and with very little spread of the signal outside of the path from antenna to receiver. Indeed, one can imagine a system in which information traveled from room to room, building to building, etc. by fiber optics, and only travels short distances between room terminals to handsets by wireless via very low power, directional antennas. Since there would be very little interference from one user to another, there would be very little problem of spectrum scarcity.

We can also stretch spectrum by use of computer power and memory. What does it really take to serve my information needs? I remember reading years ago that the average person can take in about seven bits of information per second. And of course, we are online only a small part of the day. So perhaps the average need for information from electronic sources is two or three bits per second. The ability to receive information at a constant rate, store it, and retrieve it when needed clearly would reduce the transmission capacity requirements. Similarly, some of the Internet streaming audio and video applications that are increasingly common provide vivid demonstrations of the possibility of reducing bandwidth requirements while retaining adequate information for the viewer by properly coding the transmissions. More computer intensive coding schemes might reduce bandwidth requirements still more. Using TiVo like technology, if we spread the reception of the signal for one or two hours of TV per day over a 24 hour time frame, and if we recognized how much redundancy there is from frame to frame, we could further reduce TV bandwidth requirements.

Of course, this is very different than what actually occurs. In developed countries, there is a lot of information that is broadcast. It is the threat of interference among these high power broadcasts that causes spectrum scarcity. I suggest that spectrum scarcity is therefore an artifact of the current technological system, and is concentrated in densely populated areas of relative affluence. Unfortunately, as a result, a lot of relatively affluent people are affected.

In the meeting I perceived that several people felt that it was a perfectly natural thing that governments owned the spectrum, and had the right to lease it to companies. They acted as if this was in the natural order of things. (The challenge to this view is primarily from those maintaining that some portion of the spectrum should be maintained as a commons.)

As I understand history, Newton was the first to observe the spectrum of light, passing a beam of white light through a prism, and to recognize the implications of that observation. It seems to me that were someone to have told Newton at that point that he was claiming ownership of part of the electromagnetic spectrum, say “red”, that person would have been considered mental. (My son reminds me that in Rome and China the colors purple and yellow were indeed reserved for patrician classes or rulers.)

Marconi, when he experimented with wireless in the 1890’s, didn’t have to apply for a license to use a portion of the spectrum. Thus the idea of spectrum allocations is less than 100 years old. It is interesting that it has already become so culturally embedded, that it seems to many to be self evident. If spectrum is a scarce resource, then how is it to be managed.

There was some discussion in yesterday’s meeting of private property versus commons approaches to conceptualizing the spectrum (and agreement that these might be complementary, with some bands leased to individual companies, other allocated for public agencies, and still others treated as commons). For private property, one needs to be able to exclude others from use of the property. For there to be a commons, there needs to be institutionalized rules for use of the commons to prevent the use by some from interfering with the use by others.

Hernando de Soto has written about the need to turn property into capital for development to take place. Indeed, one of his key points (as I understand it) is that in the United States, historically property rights were developed locally by frontier communities and then institutionalized by the law, providing a legal basis for transfer of ownership of land and other property, for lending on property, etc. These laws translated property into capital. In Latin America, and other colonized areas, the development of laws did not recognize and institutionalize culturally derived ideas of property, and still to this day a slum houses and micro-enterprises can not be legally sold, nor can they form the collateral for borrowing; property is thus not capital.

In the case of a portion of the spectrum, I think capitalization involves not only the ability to exclude others from using the portion, but the ability to buy and sell portions of the spectrum, and indeed to borrow against it. I see no reason why a portion of the spectrum reserved as a commons could not also be property, jointly owned by the community of users, nor why such property should not be capitalized. The commons used as grazing lands could be bought and sold by a village, so why should the portion of the spectrum used by a community not be also?

It occurs to me that the World Bank might be very helpful in building the institutions needed to make portions of spectrum property or a commons and capital. The building activities might involve acquisition of capital equipment (such as instrumentation), training, organizational development, technical assistance, creation of secondary markets for transfer of spectrum rights and responsibilities, etc.

Perhaps another good idea would be to let unlicensed uses of the spectrum proliferate in areas in which it is not a scarce resource – such as the rural areas of poor countries. I am thinking of projects such as the Digital Gangetic Plain project in India or The Fab Lab Norway’s Electronic Shepherd project to tag livestock for monitoring and tracking or the Village PDA Project.

If projects such as these demonstrate new approaches to developing connectivity in rural areas of developing nations using wireless technology, and the communities involved develop approaches to managing the use of the technology, perhaps they will be suitable for later institutionalization and legalization.

Here is a speech by someone who knows a lot more about spectrum allocation than I do! (Damning with faint praise!)