ITS conference 2013 – Brief comments on the plenary and spectrum sessions

At the beginning of this week, I attended for the first time the 24th European Regional ITS conference which was held in the beautiful Florence. This conference is mainly regulatory and business oriented, which was quite different from the technical conferences that I have previously attended. The background of the attendees was very diverse ranging from Law to Engineering which make it interesting.

The conference started last Monday with a talk by Göran Marby, Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) about the impact of regulation on operator strategy and investments. Based on the Swedish experience, Marby highlighted the importance of trust on the regulatory system to encourage investments. A way to build trust is to promote competition on services and infrastructure, which is a key role of the regulator. He also mentioned the need to redefine today’s regulation which is mostly technology oriented towards to a regulation consumer oriented where definitions of terms such as access, speed, mobility, quality of service, etc should be revisited to better meet consumers’ expectations. Some statistics about the Swedish market were also mentioned: 90% of the population has access to LTE (EU average is 27%), 400% increase in LTE subscriptions during 2013 and currently only 500 households lack of broadband access.

In the Spectrum sessions one of the hot topics was License Shared Access (LSA) authorization model. I also presented my recent results of spectrum sharing in the radar bands where the main finding was that applying regulation on the deployment of secondary users can dramatically improve sharing opportunities in these bands.

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