New Site Revealed

The SpectrumBridge.com website just completed its face lift this weekend. The site remains a portal and showcase for the SpecEx marketplace (for trading licensed spectrum), but it now also includes more info on:

• The FCC's view of secondary markets
• A breakdown of how SpecEx works for Buyers and Sellers of spectrum
• Education on the secondary market
• "Get Started" section for demos, eNewsletters, spectrum requests
• and more.

WCAI Trade Show Follow-Up

“The conference began the day of the presidential election, so that was fresh on everyone’s minds, “says Beverly Lambright, a member of Spectrum Bridge’s marketing team. “But the big buzz was focused on the economy and how that will be affecting the wireless industry."

The 3-day, annual conference included 700 registrants, 20 exhibitors, and 63 speakers in 19 panel sessions on wireless topics from WiMax deployment in North America to digital television white space and beyond. Attendees enjoyed keynote addresses from Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, Benjamin Wolff, CEO of Clearwire and Larry Page of Google, among others.

The event also hosted a Broadband Summit with FCC Commissioners and State Utility Commissioners for a Joint Conference on Advanced Services.

To read Spectrum Bridge's full report on the show, visit our Industry Events page, or click here for a pdf document.

Commentary on the White Space Vote

The white space issue was pushed through at the November 4th FCC meeting, probably as a political expedient. As such, it was not well supported or thought out. At this time it is likely that there will be a court challenge and possibly a review by the new administration. Both of which will significantly slow things down.

Even then, this is only the beginning; not the end. The FCC now has to define rules and regulations for the use of White Space and you can be sure all the interested parties will be actively involved. So it will take a significant amount of time before we can truly analyze the impact. Right now White Space is perched on the crest of the hype curve.

We will have to watch how deeply it drops into the trough of disillusionment before the reality can be assessed.

The eBay of Wireless Spectrum

Network World published a great piece on Spectrum Bridge and the new online marketplace for spectrum: SpecEx. The article hit on major points relating to the FCC, past attempts at the spectrum marketplace idea, numerous quotes, and nails some points we are currenty explaining to interested users.

See the article here: SpecEx the eBay of Wireless Spectrum

Press Releases and Forbes

Among the notable sources which are now talking about Spectrum Bridge and our product, SpecEx are:

• forbes.com
• techcrunch
• moconews.net
• fiercewireless
• washingtonpost.com
• nytimes.com
• TheRegister

Each of these links goes directly to the story about SpecEx. We are trying to keep a running list of stories on our news page, but things are taking off so quickly we're bound to miss some!

Spectrum Bridge Featured in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal newspaper reaches approximately 2 million subscribers, and the online edition boasts around 930,000 paying subscribers. The recent Spectrum Bridge feature in the WSJ was written by Mr. Amol Sharma and introduced this huge audience to the idea of buying, selling and leasing licensed spectrum on an online resource.

A notable quote from the piece was by an FCC spokesman who stated "Chairman Martin has always been supportive of secondary markets and generally sees this as a positive business framework."

We will never get tired of hearing how the FCC thinks this is a good idea. Look for Spectrum Bridge in more coverage from respected news sources such as the Wall Street Journal shortly...

Thanks Larry!

Larry Page: U.S. government should open up its spectrum.

If you read Larry Page's comments reported in the referenced article he could have been talking about Spectrum Bridge.

Within the next couple of months we will have all the capability Larry envisions online. I can't wait. We agree with everything Larry says, but would go further...

The FCC currently has a huge stash of "orphaned" spectrum that is too fragmented to auction in the traditional manner, but the spectrum exchange would be a great place to make it available to the commercial community while making some valuable revenue for the Government. So what sort of spectrum is out there?

First, there are holes between licenses. Many licenses are described as circles that don't overlap so there is the space between the circles. Then there are the left over pieces of spectrum from auctions that did not sell. Add in the little left over’s from various partitioning exercises over the years and spectrum returned to the FCC for one reason or another and the stash gets pretty big.