Stefan Mangold (Swisscom, Switzerland)
Radio spectrum is today not efficiently utilized because of complicated radio regulation processes. Access to radio spectrum is frustratingly difficult. The access is restricted by an old radio regulatory regime that emerged over the last 100 years. Large parts of our radio spectrum are allocated to licensed radio services. Only some small fractions of the radio spectrum, the unlicensed bands, are openly available, under certain limitations. The relatively new research direction carved as "Dynamic Spectrum Access" is an attempt to change this. With dynamic spectrum access, so-called cognitive radios coordinate the usage of radio spectrum without involvement of restrictive radio regulation. They operate in spectrum when it is not used by licensed radio systems, and therefore share spectrum with radio systems that have priority access. In this talk, we address some key business challenges that have to be addressed when moving this topic forward from research domain into the real life.