The Society Spectrum: Self-Regulation of Cellular Network Markets

Today’s cellular telecommunications markets require continuous monitoring and intervention by regulators in order to balance the interests of various stakeholders. In order to reduce the extent of regulatory involvements in the day-to-day business of cellular operators, the present paper proposes a “self-regulating” spectrum market regime named “society spectrum”. This regime provides a market-inherent and automatic self-balancing of stakeholder powers, which at the same time provides a series of coordination and fairness assurance functions that clearly distinguish it from “spectrum as a commons” solutions. The present paper will introduce the fundamental regulatory design and will elaborate on mechanisms to assure fairness among stakeholders and individuals. This work further puts the society spectrum into the context of contemporary radio access technologies and cognitive radio approaches.