Re: WCIT outcome?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

$20 billion for the wireless spectrum in the UK was quite a chunk of
change. And the US government raised $19 billion in a later auction. So it
is hardly surprising that there is intense government interest in
communications technology.

But one of the reasons those auctions were originally proposed was to force
various military interests to stop hogging 95% of the available bandwidth
on the offchance they might have a use for it some day. Putting a price on
the resource forced the Pentagon and GCHQ etc. to explain why they really
needed the resource which in most cases they didn't.

There are certainly a lot of political issues surrounding communications.
It is not an accident that the West German TV system was compatible with
the East German system so that East German sets could receive West German
signals. That is how the cold war was won.

But that does not change the principle that a technology that depends on
government regulation to work properly has a design error and a technology
that depends on inter-government regulation is worse.

Wireless spectrum interference was a consequence of broadcast technology.
Telephone monopolies were the consequence of the limited capabilities of
electromagnetic relay switch gear. We do not need to resort to either

There is a government interest in preventing the accumulation of monopoly
power through technical lock in. Europe has done a much better job of that
than the US. But modern wireless devices are simply a DSP connected to a
bit of wire. Adapting to pretty much any band is merely a matter of
software.


Dean Acheson once said that Britain has lost an empire and is looking for a
role. The ITU has the same problem. The technical limitations that made it
necessary to regulate communications through inter-governmental agreements
have largely disappeared. So now the only constituency the chair can find
is the governments who want to regulate communications because they are
afraid that their political institutions are fundamentally unstable.



On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:21 AM, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> I'd like my mobile phone to work all round the world, as it does. It takes
> more than one band, but only a few. And that took international regulation,
> not just cross-border issues. And I'd like no one to spill interference
> into the GPS band. And ... It really isn't as simple as you suggest. Yes,
> of course it's national governments that sell off 3G spectrum, but only
> after international agreements established that they could do so.
>
> --
> Christopher Dearlove
> Senior Principal Engineer, Communications Group
> Communications, Networks and Image Analysis Capability
> BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre
> West Hanningfield Road, Great Baddow, Chelmsford, CM2 8HN, UK
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>
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>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carlos M. Martinez [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: 03 January 2013 12:52
> To: Dearlove, Christopher (UK)
> Cc: Phillip Hallam-Baker; IETF Discussion Mailing List
> Subject: Re: WCIT outcome?
>
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>
> My point was not about the need (or lack thereof) of spectrum
> management, but rather the need (or lack thereof) of an international
> office for handling spectrum slots.
>
> The kind of allocation management you mention is an easier one to
> tackle. Radio allocation for mobile networks is distance-restricted, it
> only has to deal with local frequencies unless your are installing
> mobile antennas in border towns.
>
> If countries can be good neighbors you don't need an elephantine
> international bureaucracy to manage these type of spectrum allocation.
> Where I live this has been the case, all cross-border frequency issues
> were fixed through peer to peer negotiation between operators.
>
> As for spectrum sales, well, again it's not the ITU who's doing it, the
> regulators are.
>
> Large-scale, global, spectrum management remains an issue (i'm thinking
> about talk radio, marine/aircraft/satellite communications, navigation
> aids and similar applications), but, IMO, is a less demanding/critical
> task than it used to be, and thus the workload for the ITU-R should be
> less than it used to be.
>
> cheers!
>
> ~Carlos
>
> On 1/2/13 3:34 PM, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote:
> > Carlos M. Martinez
> >> Radio spectrum allocation was a critical task at the time (it still is,
> >> although the world doesn't depend that much on it anymore),
> >
> > Given the ever increasing number of mobile devices, one could argue that
> the world
> > has never been more dependent on radio spectrum allocation. It's still
> not that long since
> > the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer made over £20 billion from selling
> spectrum, something
> > possible since international treaties had agreed on its purpose for 3G
> communications.
> >
>
>
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