Fight Continues Over NextNav's Proposal for the 900 MHz Band
NextNav countered the arguments that RFID company Avery Dennison made in its challenge to NextNav’s proposal to offer a terrestrial complement to GPS using 900 MHz spectrum (see 2507280039). Avery Dennison said in a filing last month that NextNav’s proposal “presents a significant threat to the continued effective operation of the RFID ecosystem, which plays a vital role across multiple industries, including logistics, retail, airline, consumer goods, and healthcare.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
In a filing posted Monday in docket 25-110, NextNav said the FCC should ignore the objections. Avery Dennison “disregards the facts and analyses in the record, mischaracterizes both the Commission’s existing rules for the Lower 900 MHz band and NextNav’s proposal to optimize the band, and offers no credible technical analysis to support its claims.”
Meanwhile, Security Industry Association representatives met with staff from the FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology about their concerns. The proposal “would be detrimental to the billions of unlicensed Part 15 devices that currently operate in the band,” the group said. “These devices span a range of uses, including public safety, home automation, wireless internet service providers, security, access control, and meter reading.”
John Kim, NextNav's senior vice president of technology development, disputed the security association's comments and a report that the group filed at the FCC. “We have identified significant errors in the … study that undermine its validity. Its 5G network assumptions are hidden and appear to be specifically invented to create the appearance of interference," Kim said in an email. “The filing does not specifically examine the devices actually used by the security industry and therefore cannot show any impact to those devices. It also fails to consider current features that enable coexistence across technologies in this band.”