Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf believes regulators need to look more seriously at spectrum sharing and that an open Internet and ‘Net neutrality are crucial for innovation.

Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, says that regulators should not only tolerate but also invite experimentation with spectrum. He is in Johannesburg this week to speak at various engagements. He made the remarks on spectrum at Google’s “Big Tent” event on Thursday.

An advocate of spectrum sharing, Cerf says that the world is not making good use of radio spectrum. Those wanting to use spectrum need to be encouraged and allowed to share capacity, but this isn’t happening because of “regulatory constraints”.

A century ago, poor quality receivers necessitated clear channel isolation, which meant wasted spectrum, he says. “Now we have really good electronics. Using code division multiple access (CDMA), we have the ability to use the same spectrum for multiple transfers of information.”

Historically, spectrum has been dedicated for specific uses — with spectrum auctions proving particularly popular in the US and elsewhere — but this has meant that large sections of it are out of bounds.

“What I’m going for is allocating spectrum in ways that allow multiple parties to make use of spectrum at same time,” he says. There are digital methods to make sure signals can be independently distinguished. “This gives more dense use of the spectrum.”

Were one to hold up a radiometer in an urban environment in order to see who is using which parts of the spectrum, on average only 2% would be active at any given time, Cerf says. That’s not to say that only 2% of a particular band of spectrum is ever used, but that only a small portion of it is used at any given moment.

“If we do spectrum sharing, we could push much more application into the same spectral band and get much better use from the capacity. It’s something we should be taking advantage of.” — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media