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Simon Saunders OBE
Comparisons are often made to land — as Mark Twain famously said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” . While pithy, for me, this only captures part of the issue. It’s more accurate to think of spectrum as oxygen: it is finite, but, unless you’re going deep sea diving, it’s very rare that you’d have to worry about running out of it. The reason for that is that we’re really good at using and reusing oxygen. It gets recycled through the environment and other natural processes, and the way we breathe is highly efficient. Spectrum should be like that, too. It is finite, but it should be abundant.
Achieving this abundance means recycling, refreshing, refarming, and sharing — particularly sharing — the spectrum that we use. This is easy enough to understand. It is much harder to achieve. And this is the challenge that JOINER’s National Spectrum Facility has been established to tackle.
Spectrum’s full potential
Our current spectrum licensing system is inefficient. We need to learn how to share bands better, or we risk limiting the economic and social potential of spectrum. We need to share more densely, and ensure that spectrum access is reflective of actual usage.
This belief is reflected in the latest version of the government’s industrial strategy, which sets out the need to work with Ofcom to promote more efficient and innovative spectrum allocation and regulation.
What currently holds us back — in addition to the huge technical complexity involved — is the tension between a desire to share spectrum and a desire, particularly and understandably among those who have made significant investments, to offer certainty and consistency of service.
This is not just an engineering problem. It’s a policy and economic and legal challenge too. Hence, JOINER’s multidisciplinary approach, and the National Spectrum Facility’s provision of an open, experimental space to define and answer the most complex questions.
Revving up UK research in spectrum sharing
Perhaps our most significant differentiating factor, and the most important when considering spectrum, is the sense of scale that JOINER and its National Spectrum Facility can offer. This is scale in terms not only of geography, but of time, compute, storage, and automation capabilities.
We’ve procured equipment that sits at six of our 15 nodes, as well as loading a van (JOINERmobile) with the same cutting-edge networking gear to provide a mobile testing option. We also maintain three live monitoring stations in Bristol. The stack has been built by a team of dedicated spectrum researchers here in Bristol. And all of this will continue to grow.
The facility translates into several key functions:
- Monitoring real-time spectrum usage, to build an accurate picture of patterns of usage;
- Storing usage data and making it available to researchers to conduct their own studies;
- Presenting the data for replay so that ideas and new applications can be tested thoroughly in realistic conditions;
- Developing models based on current real-time spectrum usage to predict future spectrum spread, usage, and allocation needs.
This is not a toy simulation. The trouble with toy simulations is that, while fun, they lead to toy assumptions. JOINER boasts significant differentiation when it comes to the scale and accuracy of the real-world network environment it represents. The specific focus on spectrum sharing of the National Spectrum Facility provides a further differentiating factor for researchers interested in the field.
Other approaches to addressing spectrum scarcity — notably intra-system spectrum efficiency and attempts to open up new spectrum — offer well-trodden, often prohibitively expensive ground. The fact that inter-system spectrum sharing has received relatively little research attention means there is considerable scope for originality. The potential gains are also greater, by orders of magnitude rather than just tens of percent.
Research beyond academia
Crucially, this facility is available to researchers and innovators from across all of our JOINER nodes — and to researchers and innovators from across all domains, not just those limited to spectrum-related experimentation. We will also be enabling access to both academic innovators in both academia and industry at all scales.
Furthermore, given the spectrum challenge involves significant real-world consequences, it’s important that we engage with people beyond our immediate academic circles. With that in mind, we’ve formed a spectrum-specific advisory board as part of the National Spectrum Facility. The board includes representation from Government and Ofcom. Academics, of course, are involved as the front-end users and producers of the research, but we’ve welcomed industry members including Vodafone, Qualcomm, and a host of others via the UK Spectrum Policy Forum too.
In this way, our facility provides more than just a tech stack and access to a network. It exists to encourage, support, and accelerate research efforts into spectrum sharing — and is designed, from the ground up, to ensure our research outputs translate to the real world impacts that JOINER must deliver.