Untangling the paradox of Licensed Shared Access: Need for regulatory refocus

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102380Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The paper reviews the evolution of the Licensed Shared Access (LSA) – an innovative European spectrum access mechanism.

  • Employs the theoretical framework of Co-evolutionary Development to analyse the reasons for stalling LSA implementation.

  • Identifies barriers and mitigating co-evolutionary forces of LSA development.

  • Identifies critical need for proactive engagement of regional policymakers to ensure this innovation takes hold.

  • Proposes expansion of LSA scope to additional frequency bands (3.8–4.2 GHz) and new scenarios of local non-public networks.

Abstract

This paper looks at the evolution of the Licensed Shared Access (LSA) – a pioneering European scheme for tapping into radio spectrum that remains assigned to incumbent users. Using the theoretical framework of Co-evolutionary Development, we build analytical case study to understand why this crucial innovation did not take hold in the European wireless market, despite a decade of regulatory and standardisation efforts. Drawing on literature analysis and expert knowledge, we identify barriers that contributed to the stalling of LSA deployment and co-evolutionary forces that could help alleviating them. We expose the need for more proactive engagement of European regional policymakers and suggest directions for refocusing future LSA regulatory activities to target an expanded set of frequency bands, as well as broadening their scope to include local non-public networks and industry verticals.

Introduction

It has become widely accepted that evolving 5G and future 6G wireless market ecosystems would greatly benefit of new complementary spectrum access options, which could be provided by means of authorised shared spectrum access (Massaro & Beltrán, 2020; Matinmikko-Blue et al., 2020, pp. 1–5; RSPG, 2021b). The intrinsically dynamic and self-governing nature of shared spectrum access could create a viable market-entry opportunity for new small players, enrich the spectrum assignment toolboxes of National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) and minimise the risk of lock-in of inefficient spectrum assignment solutions if using solely traditional methods of exclusive long-term spectrum assignment (Bauer & Bohlin, 2021; Pogorel, 2018).

At the same time, access to suitable and sufficient radio spectrum remains a cornerstone of the global wireless industry, both an enabler and a bottleneck of business and innovation processes. Yet despite the perceived scarcity of spectrum, numerous practical measurements have repeatedly shown that at any given location and for most of the time a large portion (at certain times/locations it may be as large as 90–95%) of the prime UHF spectrum between 30 and 3000 MHz remains unused (Höyhtyä et al., 2014; Naikwadi & Patil, 2022; Seflek & Yaldiz, 2019). Such huge gap between assigned and actually used spectrum implies that if there were a method to make efficient use of the underutilised spectrum, that might fundamentally resolve the problem of lacking spectrum for new innovative services (Tehrani et al., 2016).

The authors share in the view that more universally available, database driven types of managed shared spectrum access schemes may indeed “transform the availability of a precious national resource – spectrum – from scarcity to abundance” (PCAST, 2012). The US is already well under way with a successful practical implementation of universal multi-tiered shared spectrum access in the form of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the 3.5 GHz band (FCC, 2020; WInnF, 2021c). Meanwhile the pioneering European initiative in this field, known as the Licensed Shared Access (LSA) scheme, after a decade of innovation and numerous successful trials, had been stalling without a single practical implementation to date (ECC, 2021b; Massaro & Beltrán, 2020).

The LSA was being developed since 2011 as a European steppingstone towards the ultimate objective of making the shared spectrum access a common norm of spectrum utilisation. The innovation process had a strong start with an early regulatory decision by the European Communications Committee (ECC) of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication Administrations (CEPT) (ECC, 2014c). It encouraged CEPT member governments (today counting 47) to deploy mobile networks in 2300–2400 MHz under the LSA regime. This was backed by successful standardisation of LSA protocol by ETSI in 2017 – the achievement which, given the manifold advantages LSA was expected to bring to the mobile market, must have spurred the market adoption (Lyytinen & King, 2002). However, by the end of 2021, the only case of official European deployment of LSA-like spectrum access regime was reported in The Netherlands, and only for narrow case of spectrum access registrations for Program Making and Special Events (PMSE) wireless equipment, such as mobile wireless cameras (ECC, 2021b). This is a far cry from previously anticipated pan-European deployment of LSA to provide access to the valuable “bandwidth expansion” for mobile operators (ETSI, 2013).

Drawing on several decades of scholarly and professional involvement of the authors in telecommunications domain, this paper builds a comprehensive case study with the aim to derive important lessons from LSA innovation story and suggest possible adjustments to its regulatory focus and scope to give LSA a renewed relevance and vitality. We apply co-evolutionary framework (Bauer et al., 2007) to understand the overall context and ultimate reasons for stalling of LSA introduction. The LSA case invites academic analysis as it represents an interesting paradox (Baird, 2021) of being a seemingly attractive regulatory solution, primed to reconcile the market and policy imperatives for sustainable and healthy competition in wireless market, and yet falling short of the actual implementation.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows. The II section provides a comprehensive analysis of history and state-of-the-art of LSA innovation. In the III section we apply co-evolutionary framework to get a better understanding of various factors affecting LSA innovation and throttling its development. This is followed by the IV section providing summary and analysis of lessons learned along with the discussion of recommended refocusing of future LSA implementation efforts. The ultimate conclusions are outlined in the V section.

Section snippets

Beginning of LSA story

At the outset of 2011, a group of industry companies, led by Nokia and Qualcomm, approached the CEPT with the proposal to consider an “evolutionary spectrum authorisation scheme for sustainable economic growth and consumer benefit” (ECC, 2014a). The initial proposal referred to this complementary licensing scheme as Authorised Shared Access and aimed at obtaining access for mobile systems to the 2.3 GHz band (to be shared with military users as well as wireless PMSE applications) and 3.8 GHz

LSA in the Co-evolutionary analysis framework

Any ground-breaking technological innovation should be seen as a broad systemic effort, requiring collaboration of multiple actors to ensure concerted development and compatibility of new and old technologies (Lyytinen & King, 2002). In this innovation effort, two or more domains or stakeholder groups are seen as co-evolving, as they all have a significant impact on each other, see Fig. 5.

In the context of LSA innovation, stakeholders are the different parties that share common interest in the

Lessons of European LSA innovation

By looking at the overall co-evolutionary status of European LSA innovation, it may be observed that most of the efforts so far had been focusing on the technology domain, i.e., figuring out how LSA hardware could work and be tied into MNOs and spectrum incumbent's systems, then drafting the necessary standards. In regulatory domain, only a generic outline of the regulatory framework had been proposed. And the many market domain issues had been left essentially not addressed by regulators, or

Conclusions

Traditionally telecom standards development, backed by major industrial and regulatory stakeholders, would be seen as a stepping stone to the successful market diffusion (Funk, 1998; Lyytinen & Fomin, 2002). But our presented analysis of LSA innovation echoes the studies of less typical cases, when a successful standard development is not enough to ensure the market uptake (Shim et al., 2018).

Having applied the lens of co-evolutionary development for LSA analysis, we arrive at the conclusions

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