25 September 2009

Economic value of unlicensed spectrum

Here a new item for my reading list. This isn't the first analysis of its kind (search for Bill Lehr's paper, for example) and it undoubtedly won't be the last. I haven't read the paper in detail yet, but a quick scan through it indicates that the paper suggests that more spectrum be allocated to unlicensed use (whether "dedicated" unlicensed or through white space devices). In our study of secondary use, we determined that adding additional unlicensed spectrum tends to favor applications and systems that have small geographic reach since the contention from other unlicensed users is lower. Most of these studies do not differentiate application types; I'll be interested to see if this one does.

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