CBRS Auction Seen Unlikely Anytime Soon, Politics Trumping Engineering at FCC
An auction of priority access licenses (PAL) in the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band may not happen until late next year, Mark Gibson, senior director-business development at CommScope, told the National Spectrum Managers Association Wednesday at its annual meeting. Fletcher Heald attorney Mitchell Lazarus warned the FCC is making more decisions based on politics rather than engineering.
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A PAL auction “probably won’t happen until, best case, the middle of next year, if that soon,” Gibson said. Comsearch is one of the proposed spectrum access system (SAS) managers in the band and Gibson co-chairs the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. The company is “hopeful” it will be fully certified as an SAS in around August, he said.
The FCC likely will find a compromise on the geographic size of licenses in the CBRS band that nobody likes, Gibson said. Discussions are ongoing (see 1805160036), he noted. “I think that’s going to be a consensus approach,” he said. “The problem with a consensus at the commission is everybody walks away unhappy. The commission is happy when everyone is unhappy.” Gibson predicted the FCC will allow for some larger PALs in each market and small PALs, either census tracts or counties.
Some ask what can you do in CBRS that you can’t do anywhere else, Gibson said. “It’s the one band you can do everything else that you can’t do in other bands, except maybe broadcast,” he said. “It’s a band that’s meant for all types technologies, all types of communications schemes.”
Lazarus, who represents the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC) and other clients, worried about the decision the FCC will make on the 6 GHz band. The coalition lobbying for the change has a combined market capitalization of $4.2 trillion, Lazarus said. The engineering shows fixed-wireless connections would face a “devastating” level of harmful interference, but engineering might not carry the day, he said.
“I’m worried about this proceeding, which is going to be a real test of how the FCC handles these things,” Lazarus said. “We’re going to respond on the technical issues, and how the FCC decides this is going to say a lot about their thinking.” Will it make a decision based on technology or “political grounds,” he asked. Lazarus said the current FCC on the whole is more political than past commissions, just as Washington in general is.
Eighth-floor staff really can’t make judgments based on the engineering behind a proposal, Lazarus said. The Office of Engineering and Technology can face political pressure and “knows what the eighth floor wants to hear,” he said. “It’s always hard for a department to tell management what they want to hear is not possible.” Also, the eighth floor doesn’t have to listen to OET, he said.
The FWCC has made clear concerns about protecting fixed lengths in the band (see 1804020036). Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Microsoft and Qualcomm are among companies pushing to open the band for unlicensed use (see 1801260043). The two sides have exchanged blows in docket 17-183. In the most recent filing this week, tech companies refuted arguments by FWCC and others (see 1805140049). The coalition “criticized us for the most part for assumptions we did not make and from drawing conclusions from the data we did not draw,” Lazarus said.
Lazarus’ broader advice to NSMA was to prepare for politics. “People who come to the FCC on technical questions need to know that political considerations will be a factor, very likely,” he said.