Digital Global Systems (DGS) is smack in the middle of a heated debate in the wireless industry.
The company needs to appeal to wireless carriers, as well as their equipment and end-user device suppliers, in order to license its technology for optimizing and sharing spectrum. Yet some of those same potential customers are dead set against sharing spectrum.
Therefore, depending on how you look at it, DGS’s presence at the Mobile World Congress Las Vegas show this past week could be interpreted as preaching to the choir or poking the bear.
DGS was at the show in part to pitch licensing its vast array of patents — more than 230 with another 105 pending – that enable spectrum sharing and optimization. Spectrum sharing is likely necessary in the U.S., given the scarcity of unencumbered spectrum. As for optimization: Who doesn’t want to make better use of their existing spectrum?
But U.S. carriers, represented by CTIA, are lobbying hard against spectrum sharing because they don’t want to share. For example: AT&T has an ambitious proposal to move the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) — a shared band — to the 3.1-3.3 GHz band. The move would create an opportunity for an auction of the 3.55-3.7 GHz band for licensed, full-power 5G that would not be shared — at great trouble and expense to existing CBRS users.
DGS CEO Chairman and CEO Fernando Murias said the company is making inroads with big U.S. carriers, hyperscalers and system integrators, but they’re under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and Murias didn’t name names.
Potential customers are interested in DGS’s AI for spectrum optimization and pattern recognition to optimize spectrum use and drive revenue opportunities.
Most carriers are using AI to drive down costs, but the real money comes when AI is used to drive revenues, DGS CTO Armando Montalvo said. By using enhanced data intelligence that DGS sensor technology provides, network operators can create new services, according to the company.
What differentiates DGS’s technology is the number of dimensions it considers with respect to the RF environment. The DGS technology is able to provide a “much more robust” analysis of what’s happening in the RF environment to determine if signals can coexist and how to prioritize certain signals, which is essential to dynamic spectrum sharing , Murias said.
It’s all about timing
It’s anybody’s guess when U.S. carriers will actually implement the type of dynamic spectrum sharing that DGS is talking about.
The first most likely area is the lower 3 GHz band, which is heavily used by the Department of Defense and is a key part of AT&T’s latest proposal.
A white paper by 5G Americas released this week identifies the 7.125-8.4 GHz spectrum range as important for 6G and even though 5G Americas prefers exclusively licensed spectrum, it suggests that the only way to gain access to any significant amount of spectrum for 6G may be through spectrum sharing.
Montalvo stressed that it’s not just a U.S.-based issue. Governments elsewhere are grappling with providing spectrum for up-and-coming applications, and sharing is the most likely outcome. But the U.S. is one of the biggest markets.
“The U.S. has an opportunity here to lead by showing that dynamic spectrum sharing is a very viable path forward that can generate economic returns very quickly,” Murias said.