Updated 11:43PM Eastern

Marguerite Reardon of CNET has this nice little interview with CTIA CEO Steve Largent and head of regulatory affairs Chris Guttman-McCabe.  Reardon asked some important questions on wireless policies, Title II reclassification, and Net Neutrality.

I’ve already had plenty to say on reclassification and Wireless Net Neutrality so I won’t rehash them here, but one of the questions really stood out to me that I thought deserved some additional discussion.  Reardon asked:

“But don’t you think in a way that the FCC has created the spectrum shortage by selling spectrum licenses? I mean, if someone spends a lot of money to buy spectrum, they own that spectrum even though they aren’t using it all the time. The result is less spectrum available for new uses by everyone else.”

This question seems to imply that private owners of spectrum use spectrum less efficiently than unlicensed spectrum or the “spectrum commons”.  Many spectrum commons advocates routinely tout how unlicensed Wi-Fi is more efficiently used because there is more activity on the Wi-Fi frequencies that they can easily observe than other licensed frequency blocks.  The question however is whether that activity is meaningful data or meaningless overhead.

An OFCOM study in 2009 found in parts of London that Wi-Fi beacons and other “housekeeping” overhead traffic accounted for 90% of the data sent over Wi-Fi which means 90% of the traffic is not much better than worthless noise.  What makes this even more astounding is the fact that most Wi-Fi base stations are limited to 100 milliwatts of power and usually come with relatively small antennas that might increase the Effective Radiated Power to 400 milliwatts (0.4 watts).  Had the typical power level been allowed to rise to 4 watt ERP, which is 10 times bigger, we can easily expect the probability and frequency of interference to be 10 times higher.  If we allowed unlicensed Wi-Fi power levels to rise to 40 watt ERP (which might be the power level of a suburban cell tower), we would expect a 100-fold interference for an unlicensed Wi-Fi network.

Spectrum commons advocates would argue that Wi-Fi is held back because of its over restrictive power levels and poor propagation frequencies, but the reverse is actually true.  It is the limited power levels and limited propagation is what allows Wi-Fi to even work at all.  If anything, the power levels are already too high in denser population areas and anyone who has ever tried to use Wi-Fi at a busy conference knows how unreliable it is.  While cellular data services can get congested as well, they are usually the better alternative at busy trade shows.  Spectrum commons advocates would argue that unlicensed Wi-Fi has too little spectrum allocated to it, but 2.4 GHz has 80 MHz of spectrum and 5.3 GHz has up to 480 MHz of spectrum which is more than all of the commercial cellular operators combined.

That level of interference is a nonstarter which is why no developed nation has ever switched to a spectrum commons.  The idea of allowing everyone to use the spectrum sounds noble, but it would suffer a massive tragedy of the commons.  By allowing everyone to own spectrum, it effectively becomes owned by no one because the entire spectrum becomes relegated to junk status from interference.  Some would argue that devices can work around or avoid interference, but it has never been shown to work.  If such a thing was practical, we would have seen Wi-Fi manufacturers and other unlicensed wireless device makers adopt the technology long ago.