Net Results: At the very end of last month, Ireland had the unusual opportunity to host an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) closed meeting on spectrum management - held here because work is being done on the OECD buildings in Paris.

Realising that the gathering would bring some of the top names in the area into Dublin for a few days, communications regulator ComReg decided it provided a good opportunity to hold an open meeting, too - a conference for operators, industry and anyone interested in many of the issues being discussed behind closed doors. Spectrum management is an increasingly hot issue in the industry and for regulators. The internecine industry tiffs and the court challenges over the awarding or removal of licences and provision of services may be the point at which most of us come across ComReg, but making decisions about how spectrum should be used now and in the future is also a major role for the regulator.

Such decisions will determine the economic path Ireland will tread, because how spectrum is owned and accessed can encourage research and development (R&D) activity to come into the country and new businesses to form, or allow it to be ringfenced off for the use of the few.

To complicate things further, safety and security issues are also rolled up into the spectrum debate because spectrum is not just needed for broadcast purposes and for our phone, mobile and internet networks, but for military and law enforcement use; emergency services; air traffic control, even the operation of life support and medical analysis devices in hospitals.

Add to that the fact that spectrum has become an unseen part of many mundane activities, used when your microwave runs, your home wireless network is functioning, your garage door opener operates - even when you bleep your car door to activate the alarm - and you can see that life as we know it in our device-fixated world would become impossible without well-managed spectrum.

That was all part of the mix at the conference, Toward more flexible spectrum use: the digital dividend? says Isolde Goggin, ComReg chairwoman. She notes that Ireland is in a fairly comfortable and unusual position regarding spectrum, mainly because, lacking a large military or security service reserving large swathes of it, we have so much of it.

We also are an island with no bordering countries except Northern Ireland, so we don't have problems with frequency overlap and interference. Contrast that with Germany, says Goggin, whose borders touch on 10 other nations.

Okay, so we are fortunate to have more spectrum than many places, with less potential interference, but that still leaves a big question of what to do with it. For most states, says Goggin, the original approach was to sell off slices of spectrum for commercial use. Buyers were licensed to have exclusive use of their allocation and, to some extent, control it.

That is how telecoms operators have viewed spectrum for years and it is the dominant commercial model in the US (although the US also has a strong "commons" approach too, which has allowed for the proliferation of wireless networks).

Increasingly though, regulators are unsure that this "buy and control" model is the best for commercial growth and economic and social development, given that spectrum is running out and new technologies for more efficient spectrum use actually need to use a wide band of spectrum - wider than would be granted to a single licence holder - or need to jump across bands of spectrum, using whatever is available at any given time to reduce congestion.

As the conference made clear, many commercial operators are reluctant to move to such models. They are also unsure of how they would go about charging other operators for moving on and off their spectrum band, though enthusiasts say a system would evolve much like the one used now for call termination - eg when a call from one operator moves through and terminates in another network.

There are other commercial considerations around licensing too. At the conference, Thomas Hazlett, professor of law and economics at George Mason University and a former chief economist at the federal communications commission, pointed out that delays in licensing in the US, and a command and control attitude from those who bought licences, meant that the US lost ground after the 1980s in the mobile sector, while Europe's more open model took off.

The US still lags Europe and the Far East in the mobile arena, with far lower mobile penetration than other countries and fewer applications and services on offer. Goggin says Ireland needs to factor in all these considerations as it looks at how to manage spectrum going forward.

"We certainly would like to see our abundance of spectrum used for research and development," she says.

She thinks spectrum can be used as a "hook" to bring in international R&D, benefiting industry here as well as third-level institutions. Such an approach is some of the thinking behind ComReg's Test and Trial programme, which lets researchers and industry get access to unused spectrum for experimentation and trial runs of applications and technologies. Around 30 organisations are now using spectrum on the programme, she says.

One challenge for regulators is the shifting ways in which spectrum is used, thanks to the proliferation of devices, especially converged devices like mobiles. Mobiles are still defined only as devices capable of making or receiving a call, even though they are now used for internet browsing, as radios, MP3 players and, more recently, as tiny portable televisions.

In addition, take on board the changing ways in which users access such devices. Mobiles have gone in a little over a decade from running on analogue networks to GSM to GPRS to 3G and Edge.

Goggin says Ireland is moving more towards a market-based approach with licences, "more in the direction of auctions for licences but also towards more licences that are technology and service neutral".

Such approaches will not make everyone happy, and the debate looks set to continue. Which suits Goggin fine. More discussion, as exemplified by the recent conference, means more awareness. "We are on a mission to raise awareness about spectrum."