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Spectrum Wars
by Stan Dunn
Technology has intruded into nearly every
aspect of our lives. It has changed the way we shop, communicate, travel, research and work. It has streamlined preflight planning and integrated many flight tasks resulting in greater efficiency and fewer errors. It has improved the safety record of aviation but has also introduced new challenges for pilots.
Several years ago, I decided to put my economics degree to use and began writing mar- ket analyses for a financial
publication. One of the sectors that I focused on was telecommunications. A new era had dawned in an industry that had predominantly considered physical property its primary asset. Phone and cable lines were tangible goods that historically defined the reach of the phone companies. The new normal (established by the prolif- eration of cellular devices) produced a mad scramble to own the airwaves. Wavelength spectrum was suddenly a trillion-dollar business. Two auc- tions last year drew over $100 bil- lion of bidding for radio frequencies. It was just the latest of many such spectacular sales.
In the history of humanity, no other good or service is as uniform- ly in demand as cellular is today.
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Regardless of income level, profession, nationality or ideology, nearly every- one has a mobile device and a plan to go with it. Every single one of us taps the capacity of cellular wavelength in order to consume content. As data demands have morphed from the light touch of Blackberry email into the heavy load of video streaming, the industry has been forced to expand its allocation of spectrum in order to satisfy hungry customers.
The benign history of the cellular spectrum has suddenly become an important subject matter around air- ports. More than ever a pilot needs to understand the physical prop- erties of these (now) billion-dollar wavelengths. Every time you tune a VOR (or a radio), you are changing the length of the radio wave that the unit receives (measured from peak to peak). Long wavelengths transmit less information per second than