DOD preparing for first large-scale demonstration of spectrum-sharing tech in 2025
As Pentagon officials continue advocacy to prevent the military’s share of the electromagnetic spectrum from being sold to commercial industry, the Defense Department is looking to demonstrate emerging dynamic spectrum-sharing capabilities before the end of the year.
In December 2024, the DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer published a solicitation for the Advanced Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Demonstration, which called for industry technology that could allow the Pentagon and private sector to simultaneously use the same spectrum band. The department is currently evaluating proposals for source selection and intends to conduct the demonstration in November 2025, Tom Rondeau, principal director for the FutureG office, said Wednesday.
“We’re focused on the lower 3 GHz band. … It is a very difficult band for DOD. We have dozens of types of systems — hundreds of systems total — that operate in that lower 3 Ghz band,” Rondeau said during a panel at the Apex Defense Conference. “How do we share that? How can we do that with commercial success? Because that is important too, … but we can’t do it at the cost of national security.”
The demonstration comes following years of back-and-forth between the Defense Department and the commercial telecommunications industry over access to the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band used by the Pentagon to operate different radars, weapons and other electronic systems. However, the telecom industry wants part of that spectrum to meet rising demand for commercial and civil 5G wireless technology.
While the debate over spectrum access has been going on for decades, lawmakers and Pentagon officials have recently expressed concerns that auctioning off parts of the spectrum to industry could hamper President Donald Trump’s homeland missile defense project known as Golden Dome.
After a congressionally mandated study determined that it’s possible for the Pentagon and industry to share the lower 3 GHz band of the spectrum, the Biden administration’s 2023 National Spectrum Strategy called for additional analysis into dynamic spectrum-sharing operations.
According to the department’s RFP for this year’s demonstration, the results of the event will help inform the follow-on study requested by the National Spectrum Strategy.
“The goal of this effort is to show how advancements in one or more of the key spectrum-sharing enablers can achieve the overall objective of proving the viability of spectrum sharing in the 3100-3450 MHz band,” the RFP stated.
The experiment will be coordinated in partnership between the Pentagon and the National Spectrum Consortium, which represents hundreds of industry and academia organizations working on spectrum-related issues, as well as other federal agencies.
The department has conducted a number of experiments on dynamic spectrum-sharing operations in the past, but Rondeau noted that the November demonstration will be the first of its kind in terms of size and scale.
“The real gap that we’ve had in these past spectrum-sharing projects has been scale. They’ve been, frankly, under-resourced concepts on a table, maybe in a lab, maybe one or two outdoor experiments here and there. But nothing at this scale, which is a large-scale, multi-domain spectrum-sharing demonstration,” he said.
