The UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has announced that Real Wireless is a winner in the recent Spectrum Sandbox competition.
One of three winners, Real Wireless will test the sharing of spectrum in an Ofcom-licensed Spectrum Sandbox environment to help identify how technology and regulation could provide a greater intensity of spectrum sharing, bringing benefits to the economy.
The two notable bands being studied more closely in the sandbox projects are:
- the upper 6 GHz band, which can be used for both mobile and Wi-Fi applications. The telecoms industry is very interested in how sharing of the band can be achieved to facilitate the coexistence of both mobile and Wi-Fi.
- the upper n77 band (3.8 to 4.2 GHz) is already available through Ofcom’s shared access licence framework, where private network users can apply to Ofcom on a first come first served basis; however, the allocation of these licences is often considered slow and the permitted power limits are considered too low by prospective end-users, thereby reducing the perceived usefulness of this framework in the market.
Simon Fletcher, CEO of Real Wireless commented ‘We are delighted to be working on this ground-breaking project with DSIT and Ofcom, using both practical field measurements and network simulation to assess how new regulatory options such as dynamic sharing of spectrum could deliver real economic benefits to wireless users’
