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DySPAN 2025, the premier international conference on spectrum innovation, was held in London from May 12th to 16th at King’s College London. The event focused on advancing spectrum innovation to meet the growing demands for wireless capacity across diverse applications; DSIT, Ofcom, UK Spectrum Policy Forum, Digital Catapult, and international collaborators supported it.
The week-long showcase highlighted the significance of spectrum while addressing key issues such as spectrum management, access, sharing, coexistence, and utilisation in current and emerging wireless technologies.
The UK was selected to internationalise the event: this is the first time the event has been held outside the US since Covid-19. “The UK has an innovation-friendly environment around spectrum and wireless systems. We are at the centre of world-leading research, and many academics, countrywide, are on the organising committee. The UK is a gateway for doing business with other countries, and Ofcom is a well-respected regulator globally,” Simon Saunders, the event’s General Chair, said.
He continued: “DySPAN had a very successful event earlier this year in Washington, DC. There was an impressive amount of collaboration between researchers, industry and government. But while we had international representation, we wanted to ensure 2025’s event was a truly international affair. The organising committee and I discussed options and decided that London was the place to take the event global.”
With keynotes on topics such as spectrum sharing for innovation and growth, capturing wireless content for live broadcast, getting to markets for an automated DSA future, the conference shared insights from experts from Ofcom, Olympic Broadcasting Services and experienced economist Dr William Lehr.
The event also discussed submissions of research papers that addressed key challenges and breakthroughs in spectrum management, access, sharing, and policy, with particular interest in interdisciplinary work that spans both technological and regulatory perspectives. As next-generation wireless technologies like mmWave and THz become mainstream, innovative spectrum utilisation, allocation, and sharing are critical.
The accepted papers for DySPAN 2025 are available here, with contributions from industry, academia, and government stakeholders to share insights, collaborate, and shape the future of spectrum management. (Please note that these are not the final papers published in IEEE Xplore.)