Spectrum Deficit, Cognitive Radio, 802.22, and TV Towers Rise Again

Innovation in electronics needs standards, whether by specification or de-facto, to thrive. We've come through the progression of parallel buses surrounding a microprocessor, to serial interconnects driving peripherals, and now are entering the age of wireless. There's a crunch coming in available RF spectrum that will trigger the next long term innovation.

I'm not talking about LTE, which has been hailed as the next great thing. LTE solves the bandwidth issue to a particular device, but it does not solve the issue of spectrum deficit. While "4 bars" of signal strength and an estimated 98% signal coverage of the US are great, the reality is there's not enough capacity to meet demand. In simple good-enough-for-horseshoes math, demand for wireless data is doubling every year. The LTE build out will take about 4 years and increase the data capacity about 20 times over a comparable GSM network. That means in 2015, we break somewhere around even.

Break even isn't good enough when you consider we already have spectrum deficit problems. Consider this problem on a smaller scale, one you might have experienced: that last conference you were at, where there were dozens Wi-Fi hotspots and if you could manage to get connected to one, things were incredibly slow? While signal is everywhere, there are only so many bits of data that can be crammed into a slice of the RF spectrum using particular encoding methods.

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