As is generally the way with European bureaucracies, the ECC is just one component of a broader organizational Russian doll. It appears to be a subset of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) and it is the latter’s proposals that the ECC is happy to have rubber-stamped and handed on to the next link in the chain for further rubber-stamping.
Harmonization, by definition, is a laborious process, requiring the choreographed approval of a bunch of different stakeholders and administrators. The danger of requiring such broad consensus before doing anything is that it can take ages to get anything done and that glacial progress can become so culturally engrained that it becomes very difficult to speed things up when needed.
The hope is that this won’t be the case with 5G, on which Europe is already behind the US and the Far East, and that some bits of the European super-tanker will find a way of moving faster than the rest. Maybe the ECC/CEPT is just such a group, but that remains to be seen, and everything presumably needs sign-off from the European Commission eventually anyway.
“ECC is pleased to support the industry providing the 5G leadership to deliver an accelerated roll-out of 5G to consumers in Europe,” said Eric Fournier, Chairman of the ECC. “ECC is committed to finally adopting the 5G spectrum regulation for the frequency bands 3400-3800 MHz and 26 GHz at its next meeting in July 2018.”
A browse through some of the supporting material offers a glimpse of the Byzantine complexity of getting things done on a pan-European level. Below we’ve copied the latest CEPT roadmap for 5G, for you to enjoy at your leisure.
Source: http://telecoms.com/488384/europe-gets-closer-to-5g-spectrum-harmonization/
