The unfinished history of usage rights for spectrum

  • Authors:
  • Martin Cave;William Webb

  • Affiliations:
  • Imperial College Business School, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom;Neul Ltd., Milton Road, Cambridge, Cambridge CB4 0EY, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Telecommunications Policy
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The key task in the next stage of spectrum management is to adapt regulation to the prospect of widespread sharing, on a much more sophisticated basis than sharing is used today. There is a role for the regulator to take steps to expand the area of choice within which public and private sector users can operate. This is best done in general by enhancing the flexibility of usage rights, which itself is best achieved by enhancing the freedom to trade them in the dimensions of time, space, level of interference and priority of access, by subdividing, re-aggregating, etc. However, there are considerable transactions cost impediments to trading where unlicensed users are involved. This creates a role for the regulator pro-actively to investigate different allocations, to make provisions for the most promising to occur and to incorporate both in refarming exercises and in primary assignments based on auctions configurations of usage rights, which might favour promising avenues of shared spectrum use.