It’s been a week of investigating the best option to demonstrate a model of industry self-regulation through a lite-licensing approach.
So far 5850-6100 Mhz (250Mhz) looks like the best option:
- Most 802.11a radios and antenna equipment can use the 4.92-6.1Ghz range.
- Both the 5850-5925 and 5925-6700 (C-band) ranges seem to be allocated to point-to-point link usage by ICASA already.
- The primary use of these bands is for Earth to satellite uplinks, c-band, vsat.
- An 802.11a channel is 20Mhz and we need at least 4 channels to start, 250Mhz should work.
- We did a scan of the 5850-6100 Mhz range from two of the more popular highsites in Cape Town and there seems to be very little activity, mostly open spectrum.
- We confirmed that the SA Weather service is using 5600 to 5650 MHz (50Mhz) for their C-band weather radar and they are currently experiencing interference from wireless networks. This translates to the following channels: 5600, 5620 and 5640.
- We leaned about SNG / ENG applications is this band.
- We learned about “teleports” and how it makes sense to group/cluster high power C-band transmitters together to avoid interference.
- We learned that the SKA project will be using spectrum around 6670Mhz and we want to avoid that.
- Telkom seems to be using the “6Ghz band” for terrestrial point-to-point. This needs more investigation.