Spectrum award procedure in the era of convergence: A key towards promoting emerging mobile services

Mobile services are rapidly spreading in the world with increasing demand of spectrum. The spectrum award procedures adopted globally has been analysed and benchmark. The strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches have been identified. The analysis revealed that the proposed award spectrum procedure should be a function of the salient features like promoting convergence, fostering competition, technology neutral and simplifying the complexity of licensing procedures. Auction fits well to the features. Auction is a simple methodology and most importantly, auction allows alternative technologies that require spectrum to be organized in different ways to compete in a converging era promoting a technology-neutral environment. This approach creates a competitive and innovative market for communications, which has substantial positive spillovers to the rest of the economy.