WASHINGTON—The WiMAX Forum today announced it has created a regulatory working group to coordinate the forum’s international spectrum harmonization efforts. The mission of the group will be twofold: to push for the standardization across borders of spectrum already designated for broadband wireless and to find secure new spectrum for future WiMAX deployment.

For its harmonization efforts, the working group, which carries the weight of the forum’s more than 100 vendors, carriers and industry organizations, will concentrate on the 3.5 GHz and 2.5 GHz licensed bands as well as 5 GHz unlicensed bands. The RWG’s task goes far beyond just convincing regulators to identify those bands as "WiMAX friendly" though, said Margaret LeBrecque, the working groups chairwoman.

It also will work to unify the deployment requirements each government places on those bands, LeBrecque said. While 3.5 GHz is by far the most common spectrum allocated for BWA (60 governments have designated it for broadband access), the channel sizes, power specifications and specific technology requirements vary from country to country, LeBrecque said. In the 2.5 GHz bands--allocated in North America, Latin American and Southeast Asia--the spectrum is broken up into noncontiguous blocks that don’t line up from country to country (and in the case of the U.S., from market to market).

"A lot of governments only allow a certain type of duplexing, some have allocated only certain amounts of spectrum from a particular band, others break the bands into different sized channels, still others have power requirements that only allow transmission at 1 Watt," LeBrecque said. "With those different requirements it’s hard to use the spectrum efficiently or achieve economies of scale."

As for new spectrum, the working group is eyeballing the lower sub-1 GHz frequencies, which allows for greater propagation. Specifically the RWG is looking at the 700 MHz band, which is now occupied by UHF television broadcasters. In the U.S., the FCC is relocating those broadcasters as they transition to digital and reallocating the spectrum. It’s critical that WiMAX isn’t overlooked when the FCC sets its new rules, LeBrecque said.