The Wireless Spectrum Shortage

The amazing growth of mobile units like smartphones and tablets is having an enormous impact on the way people communicate and on business generally. As those units become steadily more powerful, they transmit ever increasing volumes of data. Something that is often forgotten, except by people in the communications industry, is that this uses up available spectrum, and that there are limits on the spectrum available.

The ability to transmit over the air waves is a controlled function. It has been so for many years because if it were not controlled and organized, the transmissions would get mixed up, interfere with each other and become very unreliable and unsafe. So government agencies administer spectrum and data carriers buy it.

So the amount of spectrum available is limited. To complicate the situation, most of the spectrum is not owned by the mobile operators, making the availability even tighter.

All of this means that the cost of using mobile devices is bound to go up. Unlimited data plans will be a thing of the past, which they already are in some quarters now. And tiered plans that charge heavy users higher fees will continue to grow. For more on this, check this link.