LIVE FROM CTIA WIRELESS 2012: The CEOs of Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA yesterday reiterated the need for more spectrum to tackle a predicted capacity crunch in the US, with the head of the country’s number four operator also highlighting the potential for technology solutions to this issue.

Dan Mead, president and CEO of Verizon Wireless (pictured), kicked off the debate, arguing that “In order for us to deliver the benefits of advanced technologies to consumers, we need additional spectrum to reach the marketplace soon.”

Noting that his company will need additional capacity in some markets next year, and “many more” by 2015, the executive said that “we can’t wait for years” for frequencies to be made available by the government. “To manage the coming spectrum crunch, we have deployed new hardware and software technologies that make more efficient use of our spectrum,” he continued.

Referencing his company’s planned acquisition of spectrum from a number of US cable companies, as well as its proposed subsequent sale of frequencies it will not need to offer services, Mead said: “our decision to sell the [700MHz] licences clearly indicates that we are not interested in warehousing spectrum.”

“We believe both of these initiatives show that we are responsible stewards of these high value, and extremely costly assets,” the Verizon head argued.

Philipp Humm, president and CEO of T-Mobile USA, the smallest of the US’ “big four” operators, argued that additional frequency allocations alone are not the only solution. “We need to be as smart as possible in as an industry in managing our capacity.”

He noted options such as differentiated quality of service, to enable networks to dynamically assign capacity to best serve customer needs; small cell technology, to provide improved coverage in the areas where most traffic is generated; spectrum refarming, with T-Mobile itself shifting some of its 1900MHz voice capacity for data services; predictive delivery of video, to shift usage to when the network is less busy; and Wi-Fi offload.

Humm also noted the potential for “private network utilisation,” taking advantage of the 70 million private Wi-Fi networks in the US, many of which have excess bandwidth. “With the right business models, consumers could benefit from securely sharing their Wi-Fi, receiving better rates or credits,” the executive mooted, describing the idea as “crowd-sourced Wi-Fi.”