Need for FCC Receiver Standards Won't Go Away: Simington

“This has been a fraught issue at the FCC,” Simington said: “It has always died on the vine,” he said. “How can we get to a receiver standard proposal at the FCC that does not overly alarm industry and is sufficiently complex and granular” that it will “do more good than harm?” he asked.

The problem won’t go away, though FCC regulation may not be the right approach, said the agency's newest member. “Receiver standards have got to be very much on the menu going forward and we cannot afford to continue ignoring them forever.” Standards become critical as more bands are packed with high-power users, he said. His comments are here. He and others also discussed sharing frequencies.

“Spectrum sharing must be the new normal,” said Vernita Harris, DOD director-spectrum policy and programs. “We no longer have that beachfront property spectrum that we can just clear.” Everyone benefits from sharing, she said.

DOD sees promise in the use of AI and in more complicated sharing regimes similar to the three-tier system in the citizens broadband radio service band, Harris said. New frameworks have to be “rigorously tested,” and take time and resources to develop, she said: “We believe … investments are necessary to meet the needs of the increasingly crowded spectrum environment.” U.S. regulations now aren’t flexible enough for the military, she said. “We’re limited to the bands that we’re assigned. But what if there’s technology that will allow DOD to share with commercial operators?”

Sharing regimes should be tailored to the band, taking into account the priorities of users, the characteristics of the spectrum “and a mix of incumbent and new user perspectives,” Simington said. If the framework “has to be revised every time a new service is conceived, new services face a steeper barrier to entry both in costs and in time,” he said. The FCC needs to weigh the advantages of a rigid sharing regime against a dynamic regime that addresses coordination issues “on the fly, at the cost of operating overhead and limiting the functionality of each shared service,” he said.

AI will play a role in sharing but has challenges, Simington said. “Machine learning may, indeed, prove to be part of the solution,” he said: “Anyone familiar with machine learning will tell you that you need a data ocean to train and test the model, and it isn’t clear to me where that data will come from.”

“In an ideal world, receiver standards would be valuable,” but “they would increase the cost of equipment,” said Andrew Clegg, Google spectrum engineering lead. “It gives the manufacturers less flexibility to provide inexpensive devices in exchange for accepting less performance.” Rules for spectrum also change, he said. “A standard adopted today … might not necessarily be the right standard or the right lack of standard for that particular receiver in that particular band in the future,” he said. “How it’s implemented could be a very complicated mess.”

“We don’t want old equipment” without the appropriate filters “to prevent more effective use of the spectrum,” said Leonard Cali, AT&T senior vice president-global public policy. “If you put a standard in place, does it very quickly become obsolete?”

Rules for receivers have to be based on the bands and who the users are, said Salt Point Strategies' David Redl. Two adjacent wireless carriers “have every incentive to strike a contractual agreement to make sure that they’re in a good spot and that they’re maximizing the use of the band,” he said: “They paid a lot of money for it.” It's harder when a carrier is adjacent to a scientific user, he said. “You’ve got high power versus low power … money generating versus non-money generating,” he said. “There is no such thing as a standard interface between two adjacent spectrum bands.”