Licensed Shared Access: still stuck on the runway

But inaction over the last year indicates that LSA – a hybrid approach that combines the certainty of licensed access with the assumed efficiency gains of spectrum sharing – may remain attractive only to technical consultants and vendors.

According to spectrum sharing experts at an event in London yesterday, despite the fact that Nokia has proven the technology’s technical feasibility, and that CEPTCEPT stands for the European Conference of… has harmonised conditions in the 2.3 GHz band to allow it, the idea has not yet captured the imagination of operators or regulators.

Operators complain that any sharing conditions attached to spectrum licences dramatically reduce their value, and that spectrum sharing can only be a complement to exclusive licences. This view does not appear to be shifting with the emergence of 5G.

With the exception of France, which aims to carry out real-world experiments of LSA after the summer, no regulator has active plans to implement LSA. Even the French version of LSA can hardly be described as spectrum sharing in a meaningful way, because the military incumbents only operate in a small proportion of French territory.

One possible reason for regulators’ scepticism is that military blocking of spectrum access may affect one operator disproportionately. There is also uncertainty about how the required databases will be managed.

Despite this, LSA remains in my opinion a good way of addressing the central paradox in spectrum management: forecasts suggest a massive spectrum shortage is on the way, yet as H Nwana of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance put it yesterday, 90 per cent of the spectrum in 90 per cent of the places 90 per cent of the time is unused.

LSA may be cleared and ready for take-off; the question is, how do you persuade people to get on the plane?

Toby Youell, PolicyTracker

30/4/2015