The Spectrum Crunch that Never Really Was

Part of the problem is simply hoarding: some companies have rights to more than they need, at times because business models didn’t pan out. For example, Clearwire, of Bellevue, Washington, held spectrum rights that it did not use, leading Sprint Nextel to buy a big stake in the company this year to expand its own network. Indeed, companies are keen to gobble up spectrum where they can. AT&T said its proposed merger with T-Mobile was needed to merge the two companies’ spectrum resources. There’s a great deal of idle government-controlled spectrum, too. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways that existing spectrum can be used more efficiently to address the crunch sometimes felt by end users. At ball games or concerts, for instance, you’ll often find milk-carton-sized Wi-Fi receivers tucked away in the rafters. Those receivers, operating on unlicensed spectrum, already handle 60 percent of all data traffic on AT&T’s network (your phone can send data on both Wi-Fi and cellular frequencies but will opportunistically choose Wi-Fi). The boxes mop up traffic from choke points like stadiums and train stations and send it directly to fiber backhaul, putting no demand whatsoever on the cellular network. The rise of Wi-Fi shows how working flexibly with existing spectrum can deal with the problem of capacity crunch.