NCTA and WISPA Push Back Against Viaero's CBRS Waiver
NCTA and WISPA said the FCC should think twice before quickly agreeing to give Viaero a waiver of a rule that limits a single party to owning four citizens broadband radio service priority access licenses (PAL) in any market. Comments were due Wednesday to the Wireless Bureau on Viaero's proposal to buy 10 priority access licenses from Citizens Band License Co., which would result in it exceeding the limit in seven counties in Colorado (see 2509050021).
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“Waiver of the well-considered four-PAL aggregation limit would undermine Commission rules that are vital to the success of the CBRS framework,” NCTA said in a filing posted Thursday in docket 25-274. Granting the waiver “would undermine the core purposes of the CBRS framework … and would threaten the continued success of the band.” The group said it has emphasized that “aggregation limits are an important Commission tool used to ‘encourage competition by making licenses more accessible to a wide diversity of spectrum users.’” The commission “must address spectrum policy holistically, not on an ad hoc basis through waivers,” it added.
If the FCC grants the waiver request, it should be narrowly tailored “to maintain case-by-case review of specific circumstances so that the waiver process does not open the door for a de facto change in the four-PAL rule,” WISPA said. Waiver applicants “make the egregiously incorrect statement that ‘[i]t has been almost five years since the CBRS auction concluded’” and the hoped-for success of the CBRS hasn’t happened. The association said CBRS “has been an American success story, leading the way in spectrum sharing and fostering rural broadband deployment, private LTE, Internet of Things, and a host of other use cases.”