Evaluation of recent spectrum sharing concepts from business model scalability point of view

The recent exponential growth of wireless services with a wide range of diverse devices and applications requiring connectivity has motivated researchers to come up with innovative concepts to improve the efficiency of spectrum use. In particular for spectrum sharing several concepts have been recently introduced and studied, though to date only a subset has progressed into regulation and standardization. Furthermore only few of those have raised industry interest with real life deployments and sound business logic. In this paper, we evaluate business model characteristics and scalability factors of the two recent regulatory approaches for spectrum sharing: Licensed Shared Access (LSA) from Europe and Spectrum Access System (SAS) from the US. A comparison is made between these concepts to identify similarities and differences in the possible business model designs and scaling factors for developing a successful deployable sharing model. To build a scalable business model, it is supposed to: be based on scalable and automated infrastructure and processes, have low initial costs with continuous early revenues, adapt to different legal, policy and regulatory regimes, utilize network externalities and build customer `need pull' around existence of user knowledge. The results indicate that both sharing concepts meet basic requirements to scale, LSA leveraging key existing assets and capabilities of mobile network operators while SAS extends business model design from connectivity to other internet business models. Especially, adaptability to different legal regimes, platforms, automation of processes and differentiation regarding sharing economy based business models are becoming of critical importance in the context of spectrum sharing broadband in the future 5G systems.