The radio spectrum facilitates a wide variety of applications and services but has become overly crowded, especially in the past two decades. With advances in communications, more and more services rely on high data rate spectrum access. These critical services include banking, social security, telemedicine, and the exchange of technical information. Spectrum resources are in ever-greater demand as new applications emerge and existing ones continue to grow. Unfortunately, acquiring nation-wide broadband access for a new wireless carrier is costly in part because there are only a limited number of spectrum licenses per territory. This project investigates one set of innovations to make national-scale entry less costly.
The US wireless phone service industry is dominated by four large, national providers. According to the FCC's Wireless Competition Report, market shares in the wireless industry are concentrated to a degree that would provoke antitrust investigation in other industries. It is in the public interest to encourage the entry of new, nationwide competitors into this industry. A major hurdle for a new entrant is assembling a nationwide footprint of wireless licenses, i.e. one or more licenses in each territory. The cost of assembling such a nationwide coverage area is quite high using current technologies as current radios require mobile devices to operate using a similar set of spectrum bands in each territory. If future radio technologies allow an entrant to assemble a nationwide footprint from many different frequency bands, one or more for each territory, the cost of acquiring the needed licenses may be lower. This lowering of entry costs may encourage new national providers to enter the market, increase competition, and lower costs to consumers. Future radios are thus required to support a wide range of frequencies to be able to select different bands in different territories. That calls for multi-standard reconfigurable radios. Such radios can also mitigate the problems associated with limited spectrum availability and limited open bandwidth by tuning to the frequency and standard that is least heavily used at any given time. It is the purpose of this research to develop the most necessary components of a reconfigurable radio and to evaluate the ability of such radios to reduce spectrum acquisition entry costs for new competitors in wireless service.
Existing solutions for multi-standard radios support a maximum of five standards and work based on switching between a number of filters for selecting different bands. This method is not scalable. Also, existing radios cannot be reconfigured to select newly opened bands, such as VHF/UHF TV bands. This research addresses the above mentioned issues by 1) developing miniaturized micromachined tunable filters as well as hard-contact high-power micromachined transmit/receive switches to minimize the overall system complexity and cost, 2) implementing new flexible wireless transmitter and receiver integrated circuit schemes to reduce the cost by leveraging CMOS scaling and enhancing the flexibility of the transceiver, and 3) producing empirical estimates and interpreting them in the context of market entry costs based on the proposed reconfigurable radio technology. This research will have transformative impacts on the national economy. It enables nationwide broadband access to the radio spectrum at lower costs and increases competition between wireless service providers. An increase in competition can occur through the entry of new firms that compete with the four incumbent, national firms. Consumer welfare will be higher with lower prices and the higher consumption from increased competition.
