Status Quo: The Command and Control Approach
The Command and Control management approach is the one currently employed by most regulators around the globe. This approach advocates that the regulators be the centralized authorities for spectrum allocation and usage decisions. In the US example, the regulator (FCC) determines the use cases for specified spectrum portions, as well as the parties who will have access to them. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also regulates the physical layer technologies to be employed.
The allocation decisions are often static in temporal and spatial dimensions, meaning that they are valid for extended periods of time (usually decades) and for large geographical regions (country wide). The usage is often set to be exclusive; each band is dedicated to a single provider, thus maintaining interference free communication. The command and control management model dates back to initial days of wireless communications, when the technologies employed required interference-free mediums for achieving acceptable quality. Thus, it is often argued that the exclusive nature of the command and control approach is an artifact of outdated technologies.
The apparent advantages of this model is that services related to public interest could be sustained. In terms of profitability, public interest programs, for example, over-the-air television, may not be as attractive as commercial ones in the provider perspective, but they are nevertheless beneficial for the society. Therefore, these services are often implicitly enforced by the regulator through the license agreements. Another advantage is the standardization that results from such a centralized approach. Such standardization is critical in networked industries, for which the telecommunication industry is a text-book example. One scholar has published an excellent paper that shows how the development of new technologies promises to bring considerably more spectrum to the public, but would require that society embrace a new paradigm of spectrum use.
Read more about this topic: Spectrum Management
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