The UK Goverment (DCMS) published its UK Spectrum Strategy a few months ago and has won international praise for its forward looking approach. Larkhill chaired a session at a recent conference on the latest developments in spectrum policy and applications in Bratislava (CERD 2014) at which there was praise for the UK approach - in recognising the need for such a strategy as well as the quality of its content.

Last week Larkhill contributed a talk on the importance of white spaces/dynamic spectrum access to a session of the UK Spectrum Forum, whose industry members will help to shape the development of the strategy in the years ahead. Represented there were broadcasters, PMSE representatives and mobile operators. The latter is looking to gain more spectrum whilst the others are seeking to hold on to what they currently enjoy.

Our presentation stressed the importance of enabling opportunistic access, to tap into the large amounts of unused spectrum capacity. We identified TV white spaces as the first key step on this road, but forsaw the increasing importance of opportunistic. licence-exempt spectrum access more generally - serving the growing wireless connectivity needs as well as enabling innovations to flow more quickly into the market. In the years ahead, we see distribution networks becoming more complex and hybrid in nature, using a range of physical channels and adapting to consumer needs.

Although white spaces are threaten by compaction of the broadcast bands, this will not happen overnight and in the meantime regions such as Europe are likely suffer fragmentation in the availability of bands for mobile broadband. Such fragmentation is a perfect fit with the capabilities of dynamic spectrum access technologies - particularly geolocation databases. In the longer term, we expect to see the emergence of bands reserved for sharing on a licence exempt basis through the use of dynamic spectrum access. Regulators might include some reservation capabilities in such bands (as currently applies with PMSE use of white spaces), but the incentives should be there to limit any exclusivity (geographically and temporally) and thereby enable greater efficiency of spectrum use.

We encouraged industry to work together to implement the UK Strategy - in tangible practical ways. The Cambridge White Spaces Trial showed the benefits of different interests working together in achieving a result that moved UK and EU policy forward more quickly than would have been achieved through the customary partisan lobbying.