Clock ticking to repair LatAm spectrum deficiency

Mobile services in Latin America are now operating on average with 18% of the total spectrum requirement proposed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) by 2020, according to mobile broadband advisory group 5G Americas.

The ITU's 2020 recommendation is that each country should have up to 1960MHz available for services, but the Latin American average today is 354.3MHz.

When compared to ITU's previous 2015 recommendation of 1300MHz, the Latin American average comes to only 27% of that goal. The most advanced market, Brazil, does not even reach 50%, with 609MHz available.

5G Americas has in fact had to reduce its estimate of the average available, due to spectrum being returned to the authorities in countries where mergers left some players with more than their total allowance.

Thus, the regional average has fallen from 363.7MHz in November 2017, mainly due to the Telecom Argentina-Cablevisión merger in Argentina, as well as a reduction in Chile.

The situation is becoming more urgent with the prospect of deploying 5G in the region in order to make full use of the internet of things, which will greatly increase the number of devices on each network.

Furthermore, spectrum licenses awarded in recent years cannot necessarily be included in the tally of available spectrum because in many cases the associated frequencies are still being used by services other than mobile broadband, José Otero, 5G Americas CALA region director, recently told analysts.

The ITU estimates that in crowded areas, countries will actually need at least 2,000MHz of spectrum available; and in particularly overcrowded areas they will need 18,700MHz. 5G Americas notes that the ITU's official recommendation of 1960MHz for 2020 was calculated before the industry had a clear vision of how 5G would develop.

The good news is that the ITU's 3GPP working group (3rd Generation Partnership Project) has identified 13,900MHz of suitable spectrum that can eventually be used for 5G, in frequencies below 6GHz and above 24.25GHz.