Internet pioneer calls for spectrum sharing

Open networks, open platforms, open application programming interfaces, open-source operating systems and open standards arrived at through open processes — those might seem to cover the all of the bases in the pursuit of open mobility. But Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, proposed one more: open spectrum. At his keynote at the Open Mobile Summit, Cerf said that new modulation schemes in wireless for the first time allow for the sharing of spectrum between multiple parties, which makes the long-held notion of a single operator-single license obsolete. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access, which is the basis of 4G technologies WiMax and long-term evolution, abandons the notion of a single wide channel and instead splits a band into multiple sub-channels or tones. By tweaking the technologies already in development today for multiple entities, the industry could make a huge leap forward in more efficiently utilizing public spectrum resources, Cerf said. Some accommodation is necessary to change the way spectrum is allotted and paid for if the industry wants to take full advantage of the potential of what are very limited broadband resources.