FCC Commissioner Simington Addresses Silicon Flatirons Conference

Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington provided a keynote address at the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons “Frontiers in Spectrum Sharing” conference. In his remarks, Commissioner Simington examined various models for solving the problem of crowded spectrum: discussing both specific bands and challenges, as well as general concepts of spectrum sharing in current and proposed spectrum sharing regimes. Commissioner Simington said the current spectrum congestion is a good problem to have since it means it is "desirable and heavily used." The commissioner also  acknowledged that a static spectrum allocation system "solves coordination problems from its inception" but at the price of rigidity, while a dynamic system tackles coordination problems on the fly, but "at the cost of operating overhead and limiting the functionality of each shared service." While he conceded that AI and machine learning could improve dynamic spectrum sharing, Simington said that live spectrum sharing using AI/ML would require an ocean of data to train and test such a system, "and it isn’t clear to me where that data will come from."