Finding 800 MHz of Spectrum for Auction Won't Be Easy: ITIF Expert
Meeting the goals of the budget reconciliation package to make 800 MHz of spectrum available for auction (see 2507070045) won’t be easy, especially with 3.1-3.45 and 7.4-8.4 GHz exempted from potential reallocation, warned Joe Kane, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's director of broadband and spectrum policy. Kane spoke with former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly in a new webcast, part of a series for the Free State Foundation.
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There’s a lot of talk about the citizens broadband radio service band “being ripe for reconsideration,” as well as the top of the 6 GHz band, Kane said. But there are “serious policy and legal concerns on both of those.” More important than auction revenue is making sure spectrum is used “productively,” he said.
The upper C band seems a likely target, though it also presents challenges, Kane noted, adding that ITIF is interested in seeing if the FCC can expand the definition of flexible use of licensed spectrum. “Why should we have a separate license for terrestrial, mobile and satellite?” he asked. Shouldn’t “flexible mean flexible?” The problem of radio altimeters won’t go away, Kane said. “The airlines have altimeters that are really, really old” and were “built to operate outside their assigned band.” The airlines "have a lot of resistance to upgrading them.”
Kane also said most of the Trump administration’s changes to BEAD rules should prove helpful. BEAD has the potential to “go a really long way to closing the digital divide,” and the changes remove “extraneous requirements that have nothing to do with broadband.” The original program was focused on fiber deployments, and states found that those would cost as much as $77,000 per location, he said.
The new rules acknowledge that “consumers don’t really care” about the broadband technology -- “they [just] want it to work,” Kane said. “They want high-speed, reliable, scalable connections.” Focusing on the lowest-cost solution makes sense, he said. “Fiber is a great technology” when it’s “cost-effective,” but most consumers don’t need that much connectivity. A Zoom call requires speeds of about 3 Mbps up and down, while streaming a high-definition video from Netflix needs 15 Mbps, he noted, so most consumers will never use the gigabyte speeds they can get from fiber.