The Importance of Spectrum Measurements

Understanding actual usage of spectrum, versus spectrum allocations, has always been a challenge, even for regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) in the U.S., and other national regulatory agencies worldwide. This is true for both federal and non-federal allocations. While there have been numerous past attempts to establish “spectrum observatories”, such as in [1], there is still no scalable, pervasive methodology that measures spectrum usage in different frequency bands in close to real-time. Hence, every spectrum proceeding that proposes spectrum sharing inevitably faces the same hurdle: how does one share spectrum efficiently if there are almost no measurements of actual spectrum usage? On August 3, 2023, the FCC voted to adopt a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) [2] in an attempt to understand how the agency might obtain information on non-federal spectrum usage to better inform future proceedings. While this is a welcome first step, a similar effort towards understanding federal spectrum usage is also necessary, especially since many of the proposed bands for future sharing, for example in 7–24 GHz, have primarily federal incumbents.