Dynamic Spectrum Sharing: It’s Not Just for 4G and 5G

Summary Bullets:

• Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) can improve the coverage and capacity of 4G/5G networks by allowing both technologies to efficiently share the same finite, licensed spectrum.

• Spectrum-sharing goes beyond 4G/5G, including 2G and 3G and potentially Internet of Things technologies, increasing its value and diversity.

As the 5G era dawns, a technology known as DSS has become a hot topic. DSS allows operators to use the same spectrum bands simultaneously for different radio access technologies. Specifically, the industry’s 3GPP standards enable using 4G and 5G in the same spectrum. It’s “dynamic” in that the network is continually re-evaluating user activity and reallocating spectrum to 4G and 5G traffic as needed – sometimes as often as every millisecond.

Efficiently consolidating 4G and 5G traffic in the same spectrum can be particularly relevant to the first wave of 5G network deployments that use “non-standalone” 5G, which involves 5G radio technology but a legacy 4G core, since these networks manage 4G and 5G traffic using much of the same infrastructure. What’s more – DSS can help with a common challenge in 5G deployment: Because 5G is often deployed on higher frequency bands than 4G (bands with shorter range), it’s harder for operators to establish the same coverage in 5G that they had with 4G (at least initially). With DSS, they can achieve greater coverage. For example, using DSS, Vodafone Germany launched 5G in 700 MHz spectrum with a reach of around 20 square kilometers – five times the coverage area that 5G would have in a mid-band frequency like 3.5 GHz. But even without deploying 5G in low-band spectrum, DSS’s more efficient use of spectrum can increase the throughput of 4G and 5G services.