اصول فنی برای حقوق طیفی: خط مشی ها به منظور ارتقاء بهره وری بازار

This paper describes a conceptual framework to articulate clear rights of access to radio spectrum in a way that would foster an efficient market-based allocation of the resource. In this approach, regulators partition spectrum rights across the dimensions of space, time, frequency, and direction of propagation. They devolve each partition, called a licensed electrospace region (LER), to licensees who may buy, sell, aggregate, and subdivide their LERs at will. All signals outside an LER must have a power level of less than a regulated limit with de minimis exceptions. In addition, even within an LER, transmitter power or field strength must fall below a separate regulator-set level for the band. Licensees may deploy any devices and provide any services that do not violate these rules. In this framework, regulators establish a few core parameters for each band, manage a rights database, and enforce compliance with signal strength rules. This approach includes no protection of, or constraints on, receivers. Rather, the simple signal strength limits allow licensees to optimize their transmitter and receiver characteristics based on engineering and economic factors. Negotiated LER boundaries between adjacent LER owners can further balance the costs and benefits of interference protection to each.

In the United States, the federal government has traditionally regulated access to radio spectrum with command-and-control (C&C) licensing. Regulators have generally optimized the technical rules in each band for different radio services. However, rapidly evolving technology and increasing demands for new wireless services mean this rigid regulatory structure increasingly fails to accommodate new services and applications and fails to provide efficient incentives to develop and deploy new technology. Many of the existing C&C bands were allocated 50 or more years ago for services that are now outdated or use technology ill-suited to the original allocation. For example, cell phones have supplanted mobile radios; optical fiber is replacing point-to-point microwave systems; broadcast TV is losing ground to cable, satellite, and wideband Internet; and GPS has replaced many radar services. Yet, the rigid regulatory regime leaves old allocations frozen in time and unable to meet the new requirements of today's expanding wireless systems. Regulators cannot easily adapt most old band allocations to new services. Rather, they must impose the costs of scrapping old systems to reallocate and repopulate a newly emptied band. Today, regulators can adjust band allocations, but the complex rulemaking proceedings can take years, depending on whether opponents attempt to delay or modify the changes. Although the FCC's Secondary Market Report and Order allows easier license transfers, it generally does not allow any changes in the services for which the licenses can be used. This discourages investment and innovation by increasing the risk that new services and technologies cannot find sufficient accommodation in the established band plans. A number of alternative approaches could replace C&C, including a variety of flexible exclusive rights and non-licensed approaches. Here the specific design features of a flexible licensed rights regime are focused on. Although economists have designed efficient spectrum license auctions and some have advocated property rights approaches to spectrum management, they have given less attention to the structure and substance of that which is auctioned (one exception is by Hazlett & Munoz, 2009). This paper moves the ball forward by describing one conceptual framework to articulate clear rights of access to spectrum in a way that fosters a market-based, flexible-use allocation of the resource (an economic case for spectrum property rights appears in Hazlett, 2008). As Hazlett (2008) notes, “the policy goal is to initially define and package property rights so as to facilitate a pathway to efficient resource employments.” A licensed spectrum rights regime that allows market forces to optimize dynamically the allocation of the resource would minimize the need for costly interventions by regulators, create efficient incentives for investment and innovation, and strengthen the contribution of wireless technologies to the country's economy. This would benefit consumers by allowing providers to more rapidly respond to their demands. The authors argue that the flexible-use property rights they described will obviate most wholesale reallocations by allowing bands to continuously accommodate changing technologies and services according to evolving markets. It would not necessarily be the only rights regime within the overall portfolio of spectrum management tools; as noted in Section 4 below, each approach has advantages and disadvantages in different bands and applications. However, it could offer one way to articulate an economically efficient set of rights. This work seeks to find the minimal conditions necessary for market forces to balance the costs and benefits of controlling interference without unnecessarily constraining the evolution of wireless industries. Some other proposed flexible-use spectrum rights approaches are similar, but they require protecting existing receivers from interference. The protection of foreign receivers adds many complications, since users can be responsible for a potentially huge number of receivers over which they have little knowledge and no control. The approach proposed here requires users to be responsible only for keeping their transmitted signals within described license limits. Receiver users are responsible for handling signals that are within these prescribed limits. Section 2 describes the seven-dimension electrospace approach to describing radio signals and the rights to emit them. It offers a way to express the rights to use spectrum that is not tied to any specific service or technology. Section 3 discusses how traditional regulatory approaches and flexible-use property rights approach differ in the way they manage interference. Section 4 describes implementation issues and potential solutions. Section 5 concludes.

The inefficiencies inherent in the traditional C&C spectrum regulatory structure are increasingly costly as demand for new spectrum-dependent services increases. A number of different approaches could replace C&C, and an approach with more flexible licensed rights is a prime candidate. Any set of flexible licensed rights needs a way to identify the technical parameters of the spectrum a licensee can access. This paper offers one such technical framework for clear rights of spectrum access that could foster a market-based allocation of the resource and accommodate a wide range of traditional and innovative services. It would allow licensees to buy, sell, divide, and combine their rights, and it offers simple rules that reasonably account for imperfect receivers and challenging physical properties of radio waves. It includes rules that allow market forces to strike a tradeoff across the costs and benefits to different users of interference mitigation. This approach is belived to offer many advantages over traditional spectrum regulation. The approach outlined in this paper suggests an extensive research agenda. Logical next steps include developing details for a flexible-use spectrum rights system in a specific band, possibly even in some of the forthcoming new wireless bands. Other research topics include the initial partitioning of spectrum into LERs, specific ways to define, detect, and resolve power and encroachment problems, and the design of institutions and databases necessary for enforcement and secondary transactions.