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What does Shannon's Law tell us
about spectrum policy?

Shannon's Law graph
  • Capacity increases linearly with bandwidth but only logarithmically with SNR. Returns diminsh dramatically above SNR of 20 dB (past the "knee" of the curve)

  • It follows directly from Shannon's Law that nonexclusive licensing of large, contiguous regions of radio spectrum, combined with interference mitigation techniques such as antenna gain requirements, spectrum etiquettes, and cognitive radio technology, maximize the number of high bandwidth links which can be created using a given region of the radio spectrum. Why?