I. Introduction

From its very beginnings, wireless communication has played a vital role in protecting lives and property and, subsequently, through the development of radio and television broadcasting, in delivering information and entertainment programming to the public at large. More recently, regions, countries, industries, and individual companies around the world have realized that telecommunications facilities and services are indispensable enablers or drivers of productivity and economic growth, to say nothing of international competitiveness.

Furthermore, there is an increasing realization that wireless communication has both a critical role to play in terms of public safety and broadcasting and an important role to play in the telecommunications and information sectors more broadly. Wireless technology can deliver telecommunications and information services directly (a) to individuals "on the move," far from the office desk or factory floor, thereby increasing their personal productivity; and (b) to fixed locations that cannot be served economically by hard-wired facilities because of physical infeasibility or prohibitively high costs. Thus, radio-based systems play increasingly important roles in rapidly and efficiently extending the benefits of modern telecommunications and information services throughout an economy.

Unlike other natural resources, the radio spectrum has traditionally been managed by governments using an administrative process, that is, by the issuance and enforcement of government regulations. This has been true even in countries that normally rely heavily upon marketplace forces to efficiently allocate other important factors of production. But trying to manage a critical, scarce resource--the radio spectrum--in a centralized manner in the face of rapidly changing technology and rapidly increasing demand is fraught with problems. These problems with the traditional centralized, command and control, administrative approach to frequency management loom ever larger given the increasingly important role of telecommunications systems in general, and radio-based systems in particular, in facilitating productivity improvements and creating economic growth.

The forces affecting frequency management--namely, rapid technical and marketplace changes, the resulting pressure for faster decision making, and the increased economic importance of radio-based services--have led countries to investigate, experiment with, and implement alternative ways of managing the spectrum resource. These steps seek to overcome the inherent shortcomings and defects of the traditional centralized, administrative approach to the management of the spectrum resource.

The purposes of this paper are

  1. to provide basic information on the governmental institutions and processes involved in spectrum management in the United States;
  2. to provide a brief review of the traditional administrative approach to spectrum management;
  3. to review and critique past attempts at reforming the spectrum management process in the United States; and
  4. to describe the country's most recent actions toward reform, namely, the steps taken to promote competitive bidding (auctions) in the assignment of radio licenses.
Readers who are already familiar with spectrum management and the limitations of traditional approaches to the subject may wish to skip directly to sections IV and V, which deal with attempts in the United States to reform or replace traditional processes.

This paper will focus heavily (but not exclusively) on the allocation, allotment, assignment, and licensing of land mobile radio spectrum

  1. because the massive reallocations of spectrum in the 800 MHz region in the 1970s and, more recently, in the 1,800 MHz region, have provided major opportunities for adjustments in the way that the spectrum is managed in the United States; and
  2. for the very pragmatic reason that the author has had the most direct experience in that segment of the telecommunications industry.