Newswise — Fast wireless connections to the Internet demand considerable bandwidth. The problem is that only a limited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is really suitable for such applications--roughly between 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz. So the recent proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and fully mobile laptops is putting great pressure on the airwaves.
One approach that's been taken to free up more spectrum is to reduce the amount allotted to television by mandating that TV broadcasters switch from analog to digital encoding. But the U.S. experience shows how painful such a change can be. Better, perhaps, is to set up financial incentives for the providers of wireless services to use less bandwidth, without the government dictating exactly how this should be done.
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