The seventh meeting of project team 42 (PT 42) of the Spectrum Engineering working group (WG SE), which covers technical issues involving the introduction of flexible spectrum use in certain frequency bands, was held in Copenhagen last 20-22 August. The group's current goal is to respond to the European Commission (EC) mandate dated 5 July 2006, framed in the EC's new policy on flexible spectrum use. Bearing in mind the need to avoid interference, the mandate requires definition of the minimum technical conditions to be applied to the frequency bands indicated by the Radio Spectrum Committee (RSC) according to the Wireless Access Policy for Electronic Communication Services (WAPECS) concept of the Radio Spectrum Policy Group (RSPG).
The chairman presented the relevant points for the group concerning the July 2007 Electronic Communications Committee (ECC) meeting, which debated the response to the Commission's mandate to PT 42, specifically the document's acceptance as an interim reply and the decision that a more elaborate version of same (preliminary version of the final response) will be presented at the ECC meeting to begin on 17 December. If the response if concluded by 12 December, it will also be presented during the RSC meeting. The chairman also thanked the group for its high degree of participation in the correspondence work to revise the mandate response.
A decision was made to send a liaison statement to ECC project team 1 indicating that PT 42 may eventually use some of the results obtained by the group in the studies on coexistence of the ETSI BRAN standard in the 2.5 GHz band. Regarding industry contributions concerning terminal masks and new advances in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a decision was made to set up a correspondence working group to study the impact of emission masks in block/band edge masks (BEMs), currently proposed in the interim response.
Regarding the definition of BEM, the goal of the next meeting is to verify whether the emission masks presented by industry are covered by the BEM proposed for the 2.5 GHz band. If the emission masks are not considered in the current proposal, then a way to make them covered will be studied. The analysis will be based on coexistence studies and the conclusions included in a contribution to be discussed at the next meeting.
