COMPTEL PLUS — Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski predicted a looming crisis in spectrum usage because of increased demand for wireless data by consumers. Today at the COMPTEL PLUS Conference and Expo in Orlando, Chris Whiteley, director of business development for xG Technology, outlined ways that technology can help alleviate such a crisis.
Whiteley presented his remarks at a panel on emerging technologies. He began his comments by quoting Ed Thomas, former chief engineer at the FCC: "If you look at the entire RF frequency up to 100 Ghz, and take a snapshot at any given time, you'll see that only 5 to 10 percent of it is being used."
Whiteley points to newly emerging technologies that can help to unlock this underutilized capacity – freeing up enough RF spectrum to transform wireless-industry economics. Interference is not an inherent property of spectrum, but a property of devices, he added. Better receivers will pick up transmissions where earlier ones only heard static.
The solution is leveraging advanced radio agility and a network architecture that works cooperatively, analyzing channels and adapting on the fly to avoid other transmissions to take spectrum riddled with wireless garbage and turn it into a fully functioning wireless voice and data network.
Whiteley predicted that the move to better spectrum utilization through technology by xG and other companies will lead to less expensive cellular and broadband service for consumers. “The end of spectrum scarcity will cause a shift from incumbents protecting spectrum assets to those best at utilizing what’s available.”
xG offers xMax, a mobile VoIP network for the unlicensed 900 MHz band, based on these principles.
