Have you ever paused to think why is there such a mad rush to acquire spectrum? In India itself, companies together have spent more than 80 billion dollars (more than 50 percent of the overall capex spent)! Competition is so intense that some companies even adopted unfair practices – resulting in people landing in jail (infamous 2G scam). The purpose of this note is to find answers to some simple questions linked to “wireless spectrum” with the intent to sharpen our understanding of it.
Why is spectrum so scarce?
As per Wikipedia, “the radio spectrum is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum from 3 Hz to 3000 GHz (3 THz). Electromagnetic waves in this frequency range, called radio waves, are widely used in modern technology, particularly in telecommunication”. Isn’t this huge? Then why are we struggling to find even a few MHz? As, distance traveled by radio waves decreases rapidly with increase in transmitting frequency – making frequencies above 3 GHz useless for supporting macro coverage. Also, increased antenna size makes the mobile unwieldy when it has to deal with frequencies below 400 MHz (antenna size is directly linked to the wavelength, which in turn is inversely linked to the frequency of the radio wave). The problem got further aggravated due to the unstructured usage of spectrum by incumbent defense agencies, who didn’t feel any pressure from commercial players at the time they occupied it (mobile is relatively a recent phenomenon).
