Lecture Series in Mobile Telecommunications and Networks (1583KB)

want to call it – that sits there and knows what can happen so chaos cannot ensue. When you put in your bid, it
decides. The bid does not have to be money, but there is a mechanism by which you assign the resource. This can be
some kind of proxy measure, or it can be hard cash, or it can be something else.
I saw that E2R has a European programme on end-to-end reconfigurability and they had an interesting comment where
companies came together, pooled spectrum. Everyone had a base amount and then they re-bid for the spectrum on
an hourly basis or some time slot that they thought made sense. However, what actually happened was that there was
some way then of redistributing the money that came in from that among those companies, or redistributing the costs
or something. It does not always having to be trading in the sense – because the agents you describe –
Raymond Steele: Obviously, the amount of various and spectrum and other things you use, you have to pay for.
Linda Doyle: Anyway, I just think you are talking about spectrum trading in a different way.
Raymond Steele: I want to bring back regulators and I want to get rid of people paying lots of money for spectrum,
and bankrupting the industry.
Linda Doyle: But the other side of that trading – as I said earlier, trading does not mean that people will spend the
most horrible sums of money on spectrum. What actually could happen is the complete opposite, when there is a free
flow of things. I know that I am envisaging the future but, if I have a piece of technology that can use this spectrum or
that spectrum, then I can take either one of them, and I will not be over-obsessed about having this one rather than
that one. I will have a different way, and it could be cheaper for me. It might not be cheaper for the person who can
only use one bunch of spectrum and are completely stuck to it. You are pre-supposing that spectrum trading means
that everything will be an outrageous price.
Raymond Steele: Look, on any cell, in any country, there are thousands of calls being cleared down and starting up.
You have to have somebody in control. It is just ridiculous that you are all negotiating to have that bit of the spectrum
or this bit of the spectrum. It is not like that: somebody says, ‘You have that bit.’
Linda Doyle: That is true, and I am not saying that you don’t have someone in control either. Also, one of the things I
said at the beginning is that you can easily have very confused conversations about this, if everyone starts mixing
timespans. You can talk about long-term spectrum trading, where people have large chunks of stability with spectrum
over a larger amount of time, and lots of economists, if they see that cubic diagram, start asking why each of those
blocks is not 10 years long. With the scale you are talking about, with those agents in it, you might be talking really
short-term or you might be talking longer term, but it is a kind of spectrum trading.
Mr Pike: I have a fear that, in the long term, these approaches of innovation run the risk of becoming a barrier to
innovation. All of the techniques that have been described rely on co-operation in various ways. If they became
ubiquitous across the radio spectrum space, then that would prevent any future innovations which could not cooperate
for any reason, or would limit the functionality or performance to the degree of co-operation that exists in the
incumbent systems. In fact, this approach actually sows the seeds of the same problems as it is trying to solve in the
regulated regime but, if it comes across the whole spectrum space, there is not the way out for innovation that there is
at the moment with different frequency bands.
Linda Doyle: I see your point. The way I look at the interference issue and the shaping and sculpting of your mask is
that there is a basic level. You create your mask and you stay within your mask, and you are fulfilling the conditions as
required. You can improve your performance if negotiation and co-ordination happens, but it does not have to happen.
However, as I pointed out, it is the case that you have certain levels of co-ordination and co-operation in the use of
structural equipment currently and so that mindset already exists to some extent, and I do not see us stifling it in the
sense you described, because it is not a necessity but it is something that would give you an extra benefit. I realise that
something that could give you an extra benefit then becomes a necessity or could be in danger of doing so. I also think
that you are leaving parameters open in many ways because you are not saying how this has to happen or what it
actually means, but you leave a great deal of choice in the individual entity still. That is your safeguard against your
fears.
42 The Royal Academy of Engineering