With the spectrum resources shrinking gradually, the evolution of wireless technologies is closely connected with the spectrum planning. The rational planning and the proper management of spectrums will play a crucial role to promote the development of the whole industry as the technologies will be developed on sufficient spectrum. With the effort of ITU, mobile communication technologies are evolving towards IMT-Advanced, during which the spectrum planning should keep abreast with the development of IMT-Advanced. So after WRC-07, many countries and regions, China included, have started to deploy new spectrums according to the allocation results.

On November 6th, FuTURE FORUM organized Seminar on R&D of Future Spectrum Technologies, IMT-A related spectrum issues were discussed to put forward some rational suggestions on the future spectrum planning as the references for relative governmental decisions before the formal issuance of the national spectrum planning. The experts had an overall analysis and thorough discussion on the issues related to the future spectrum planning and utilization from the aspects of market requirements, technical development, and technical actualization.

Spectrum shortage will become a bottleneck issue

On this seminar, Mr. Xie Feibo, Vice Director-General of SRRC pointed out that the Real Right Law recently issued has defined the radio spectrum resource as one of the important national resources which symbolized the preciousness and the significant position of the spectrum resource as the unique carrier for the ubiquitous wireless age. The current utilization of the spectrum resource was one of the major subjects on this seminar.

It can be seen from the current situation that the number of wireless communication users keeps increasing with the development of wireless technologies and the increasing requirements on wireless services. The experts brought out a series of data on the seminar that the number of cellular net users has amounted to 3 billion and will reach 4 billion by 2009 and 5 billion by 2015 while Ericsson predicted that the contracted users will reach 6 billion by 2013 with the increasing demand of each user on their services. According to the prediction made by relative institutions, the daily traffic flow of each user will be rapidly increased from 2015to 2020, which will result in the shortage of radio spectrum resources. The experts, combining the ITU-R research with the comprehensive analysis on the spectrum demands of various countries, presumed that 1300MHz~1700MHz spectrum resource would be required by 2020. According to the result of WRC-07, besides the original 600MHz, another 400MHz was assigned to IMT, which means still 300MHz-700MHz will be lacked. The current spectrum resources are reluctant to support the development of mobile communication technologies and services, so the shortage of spectrum resources will be a bottleneck problem for the development of mobile communication systems