Additional spectrum must be urgently identified and allocated to support the growth in mobile data.
That's the message of the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) Forum at the World Radiocommunication Conference, just underway in Geneva.
As non-voice traffic grows explosively over the next decade, the UMTS Forum, a mobile industry association, warns that operators face increasing challenges to add capacity and coverage to their existing networks. As the efficiency of broadband cellular technologies rapidly approaches theoretical limits, the UMTS Forum says the gap between demand for media-rich mobile services and available network capacity will increase sharply in the coming decade.
In its most recent projections, the Forum has calculated that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 33 percent from 2010 to 2020. This growth is even more pronounced in Western Europe, where the same study forecasts that data traffic will leap by a factor of 67 percent in the same 10-year period.
Investment in new technologies and network density alone cannot address this dramatic increase in demand, the Forum warns. To sustainably deliver the full socio-economic promise of mobile broadband, it is clear that advances in technology and investment must be complemented by timely availability of harmonized radio spectrum to support new services and more users.
The UMTS wants to put pressure on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to exercise its global leadership position by putting IMT spectrum high on the agenda at the next World Radiocommunication Conference in 2015.
In its new whitepaper, "Spectrum for future development of IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced," the UMTS Forum urges the ITU to examine spectrum requirements for IMT, prior to timely identification of further bands. Specifically, it recommends that: The World Radiocommunication Conference 2012 should adopt an agenda item for the WRC-15, allowing the identification of additional IMT spectrum; the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) should conduct during the next study period (between WRC-12 and WRC-15) thorough studies on future IMT spectrum requirements; and the ITU should urge countries to coordinate their actions in order to harmonize IMT spectrum both before and during the WRC-15.
“Currently, there just isn’t enough spectrum to support the projected growth of mobile data," said UMTS Forum Chairman Jean-Pierre Bienaimé. “The continuing growth of mobile broadband clearly relies on the identification of additional IMT spectrum."
