BROADBAND WIRELESS COMPANIES ASK FOR SPECTRUM
Officials representing high-tech and wireless companies Wed. called on the FCC to allocate to promoters of wireless broadband services more low-frequency spectrum. The companies also said during an all-day FCC forum on the topic that resolving standardization issues will prove critical in coming months.
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The type of spectrum made available is as critical as the quantity, said Margaret LaBrecque of Intel, chmn. of the WiMax Forum. “At 700 MHz we may need 1/10th the number of base stations you would require at, say, 2.5 GHz. That’s a huge cost advantage,” she said. “If we're going to roll this broadband access out we must have access to good spectrum.”
Airspan Networks Vp David Reeder and other panelists said they were encouraged that the FCC is making at least some spectrum at 700 MHz available for advanced services like wireless broadband. “The desire to use spectrum lower than 1 GHz, 900 MHz for example, is very, very high,” he said. “We see a tremendous desire to use that spectrum.” But Reeder noted that so far all that has been auctioned off at 700 MHz is a pair of 6 MHz channels. “You can do a certain amount of spectrum planning and capacity planning but you can’t ever deploy a large network with lots of high bandwidth services in that amount of spectrum,” he said.
Comr. Abernathy said the calls for more spectrum weren’t a surprise. “I've never heard anyone ask for less spectrum,” she said. Jean Pierre de Vries, chief of incubation at Microsoft, however, said: “To your point, Commissioner, nobody ever wants less spectrum. If you asked me for a trade between 10 MHz at 700 MHz, vs. 1 GHz at 60 GHz, guess what I'd take. It’s a question of what the appropriate spectrum is.”
Development of equipment standards also emerged as a key issue. Standardization is the “key driver” for more widespread wireless broadband, said Guy Kelnhofer, CEO of NextNet Wireless: “It’s imperative that all of the vendors strive toward interoperability in the future.”
“The litmus test is that you're actually able to interoperate with another vendor’s equipment,” LeBrecque said. “What that means for service providers is that they can mix and match equipment on their networks from different vendors.” But LeBrecque said equally important is a group, like the WiMax Forum, that monitors compliance with standards.
FCC Chmn. Powell said the FCC must guarantee that Wi-Fi and other networks are secure as wireless broadband becomes more prevalent. Powell opened a day of testimony at the FCC’s Broadband Forum with the assurance FCC will do its best to help a full range of companies, large and small, compete. “This is not an agenda just for a phone company, just for a cable company, just for a big wireless company,” he said: “It’s also a forum for entrepreneurs and innovators.”
On network security Powell said the FCC and industry have “an historic opportunity” to engineer network security on “the front end… Too often, I think, in public service, we are working on these things on the back end of the deployment or we're bolting them on at the end.”