Release of the 59 – 64 GHz band

This statement presents Ofcom's decision to go ahead with opening the spectrum in the 59 - 64 GHz band for Fixed Wireless Systems (FWS) and to combine this with the existing 57 - 59 GHz band under one overall licence exempt authorisation approach for FWS. The decision creates one contiguous and flexible block of spectrum providing 6.8 GHz of available bandwidth (57.1 - 63.9 GHz) taking into account two 100 MHz guard bands. The large bandwidth available makes the new 57.1 - 63.9 GHz band (the 60 GHz band) suitable for very high capacity, short hop FWS (e.g. 100MBit/s ~ 1GBit/s Ethernet systems). In addition the technical conditions that will be implemented along with the high propagation attenuation around 60 GHz will allow sharing between a wide range of applications (e.g. FWS, ITS, Wireless HD and others).