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To: Dennis Roth who wrote (11426)	6/3/2000 4:53:00 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 13582

Dennis, Re: Spectrum Allocation << of interest only to hard core spectrum wars and telecom buffs >> GSMA also reports on WRC 2000 from their perspective. Current WRC 2000 Reports from GSMA (linked from below): > Week 1 > Week 2 > Week 3 gsmworld.com Shortly the GSM Association will publish a response to the conclusions of the WRC and an in-depth analysis of the Final Acts in respect of IMT-2000 issues and it should be available at the same link. That will probably be an interesting read. UMTS Forum also has published press release here: umts-forum.org - Eric -

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (11426)	6/5/2000 11:04:00 AM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 13582

<< USE OF MOBILE SPECTRUM BY IMT-2000 >> Re: 3G Spectrum (a European Viewpoint) >> SPECTRUM DISHARMONY MARS MOBILE BROADBAND SUMMIT totaltele.com By Theresa Foley CWI Online 05 June 2000 Governments of 147 countries are poised to agree that new spectrum should be made available for third-generation mobile networks, offering high-speed access to the Internet from handsets anywhere in the world. But delegates to the International Telecommunication Union's World Radiocommunications Conference 2000, meeting in Istanbul for the past month, have failed to secure a single global spectrum allocation. Instead, individual countries will have options on which of three designated bandwidth areas they choose to locate mobile data operators in. And the United States has not committed to using the newly designated spectrum for third-generation mobile services at all. Failure to get a completely harmonized spectrum agreement means that, ultimately, handsets could be costlier and heavier. "We did not get one globally harmonized band in WRC 2000," said Josef-Franz Huber, vice chairman of the UMTS Forum, in London. "In the range up to 3 gigahertz, we cannot find one contiguous band for everybody to use." Huber was one of the key supporters of a proposal from the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), Copenhagen, that Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services be given a total of 160 megahertz of new radio space in one contiguous band at 2.5 GHz. Instead, new spectrum will be divided across three frequency ranges: between 2.5-2.690 GHz, 1.710-1.885 GHz and some in the 800-900 GHz range. Industry observers said the WRC decision clears the way for UMTS to be introduced in all countries. But the compromise at the WRC means that administrations will be left free to choose among the bands that best suit their territories; those frequencies are not in a single chunk of waveband, are not prioritized and have no set timetable for adoption. "Everyone will go away with something in this package but no one got everything they wanted," said Alan Jamieson, managing director of Added Value Applications Ltd., a consulting company in Auckland, New Zealand, who chaired the working group that oversaw IMT 2000 at the WRC. "We have made spectrum available without being precise as to who or when it can be used." "Industry can adapt to that," he added. "The broad parameters have been established. They leave plenty of room for innovation and creativity, which is what industry needs." But manufacturers, vendors and operators are now faced with the prospect of patchy global coverage and a complex requirement for frequency shifting for roaming as they try to implement the IMT 2000 dream of a single, globally usable device for mobile multimedia within the framework that WRC 2000 has handed them. HEAVIER HANDSETS Huber says the industry is up to handling the frequency shifting technologies inside the handsets, but other officials say that the inability to get a contiguous piece of spectrum will make handsets costlier and heavier. The freedom to postpone implementation of the expansion spectrum or ignore it altogether was key to getting all parties to agree to the IMT 2000 package. But it also could put the United States, which lags Europe and Japan by several years in mobile services, even further behind. Europe and Asia are expected to move quickly and aggressively toward putting the new spectrum, which will become available around 2005, to work. While the United States could continue to watch the 3G world unfold from the sidelines, if it chooses to defer 3G licenses to protect other spectrum occupants such as the U.S. military. But the prospect of adding Canada and the United States to the global IMT 2000 market excites UMTS Forum managers. "The extension bands will allow wider distribution of IMT 2000," said Huber. "We will have more possibilities to put IMT 2000 in the marketplace, especially in the large marketplace of North America, which was [previously] blocked from using the 3G bands [in the 2 GHz region]." However, the United States did not commit itself to providing additional spectrum for 3G use, even within the bands newly designated. "We cannot take billions of dollars of taxpayer investment and toss it to the winds," said Ambassador Gail Schoettler, of the U.S. State Department. Rather than quickly doling out spectrum, the United States will study the bands to find places where frequencies can be shared, said Schoettler. The 1710-1885 GHz band that Huber assumes the United States will move ahead in opening for 3G is being particularly problematic, Schoettler said, because it is heavily used by the military. And Schoettler cautioned that the implementation of waveband for 3G in the United States will take some time since all the bands identified by WRC 2000 for expansion have current users. Even more direct opposition came from countries such as Russia, which took the position at the start of the conference that it was too early to speak about additional bands for IMT 2000. COSTLY RELOCATION Relocating services already operating in the bands to clear the way for mobile multimedia "is costly, is not easy and should only be done when absolutely necessary," said Valery Timofeev, a member of the ITU radio regulations board and the deputy minister of the Russian Federation's ministry of telecommunications and informatization. ¸ EMAP Media 2000 << - Eric -