This statement advances the aims set out in the Licence Exempt Framework Review (LEFR) to develop the framework for the regulation of licence-exempt devices. This statement focuses on the specific area of determining which applications should share licence-exempt bands and how they should behave with respect to each other.
We will not introduce the proposals in our regulations immediately. These ideas are for future licence-exempt decisions and we are not planning to implement them in the UK in the short term. It is our intention to bring these ideas to inform debate within the international bodies such as the relevant European entities considering licence-exempt issues.
We propose a scheme based on the division of licence-exempt applications according to their interference characteristics. These are evaluated by means of an Interference Indicator. Its value is calculated according to the likelihood of an application in causing interference and based on its parameters of bandwidth, duty cycle, range and expected deployment density. A Spectrum Commons Class is defined as a range of Indicator values. Applications with similar Indicator values will belong to the same class, and only applications in a class will be allowed in a particular band. As a result, only applications with like interference potential would share spectrum. Within a class we propose that applications minimise their transmissions where possible and share the resource equitably through the use of polite protocols.