Company to Create Airwaves Exchange

Vibrant financial markets exist for trading everything from bushels of corn to barrels of oil. Now a new company is hoping to do the same for the nation's airwaves, with an online trading exchange for radio spectrum. The company, Spectrum Bridge Inc., will match buyers and sellers of spectrum licenses used for wireless communications. Its Web site, SpecEx.com, will go live on Friday with an initial inventory of about $250 million of spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission during periodic auctions doles out licenses to use particular radio frequencies. While most of the prime spectrum used by cellphones, two-way radios used by first responders and other communications gear has already been allocated by the agency, much of it isn't actually in use at any given moment. Spectrum Bridge hopes to create an organized secondary market to help recycle those "fallow" frequencies.