The U.K. Office of Communications wants input on...

increased, demand for wireless services and connectivity, it said. One way to meet the demand is to clear spectrum to make way for mobile broadband services, and there are initiatives under way in that area, it said. In the long run, it will become harder to find significant amounts of additional spectrum to clear, and spectrum sharing could be a partial solution, it said. The consultation addresses four main spectrum sharing issues: (1) Supporting future Wi-Fi use. The issue is whether more spectrum in the 5 GHz band may be needed to provide higher speed connections to match those offered by rollout of fixed superfast broadband and to support the growing use of Wi-Fi to offload mobile data and create indoor networks. (2) Boosting the future supply of spectrum for mobile broadband and M2M using spectrum shared on a geographic basis. Geographical access to unused spectrum in some existing bands could be well suited for use by the increasing number of small cells likely to be needed in high-demand urban areas. Sharing spectrum there could give access to more than several hundred MHz of additional spectrum in highly desirable bands below 6 GHz. (3) Using dynamic spectrum access to improve sharing between devices. Advances in dynamic spectrum access technologies could let devices make more intelligent decisions about how to operate in a given location to minimize interference. (4) Shorter-term access to shared spectrum to support research and development. Ofcom currently makes spectrum available under R&D licenses on the basis of specific requests, it said. But R&D sharing arrangements could be agreed upon with current users of the applicable spectrum, allowing spectrum to be accessible by, for example, a geolocation database, it said. Comments are due Nov. 9 -- http://bit.ly/198kPgs.