It's Going to be Easier to "Bring Your Own Access"

In many ways, “bring your own access” is an accurate way to describe the way end users reach their preferred app and service providers.

It seems inevitable that greater reliance on a mix of spectrum, networks and licensing regimes will be a hallmark of all next-generation networks from this point forward. You might call this an example of "bring your own access " in the communications-related businesses.

That is a new approach, historically. Telcos, TV and radio broadcasters, cable TV companies and others have essentially supplied the access function as part of their core services.

Wi-Fi was the first major break in the pattern. In that case, the end user supplies his or her own access, in the sense of paying for the access connection and the local small cell transmitter function.

For the first time, the app is fully separated from the access, in terms of who pays for the access connection and features.

On the supplier side of the value chain, we are moving from communications using “only my owned resources” to a heterogeneous world where the access function routinely uses a mix of resources (both “my assets” and “any other available assets.”

On the user side of the value chain, access is a decision logically separate from the “which apps do I want to use?” decision.

Consider the implications for supplier business models. Up to this point, nearly all big commercial wireless industries have been built on the use of licensed spectrum that also has been highly regulated in terms of what protocols can be used in each frequency band and often even what applications are lawful in such bands.

Wi-Fi has been the first shift away from that pattern. Having shown the role license-exempt spectrum can play in supporting many industries, including those using licensed spectrum, new work is being done to increase the amount of license-exempt spectrum available for communications uses.

There are business model implications. To the extent spectrum remains a relatively scarce commodity, licensing creates moats around some business models.

Freeing up more license-exempt spectrum creates new ways for businesses to be built on communications spectrum at vastly lower cost.

And that is what the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has planned: releasing 7 GHz of new unlicensed spectrum, as part of a planned release of 29 GHz of new communications spectrum, in millimeter bands.

Obviously, all that new spectrum, plus spectrum sharing in a number of other bands, will increase the odds that new providers of Internet access are going to enter the market.