Wireless Spectrum Auctions

The FCC remains focused on the lower 3 GHz band for commercial use and will consider an auction of spectrum remaining, or returned, from past auctions when its auction authority is restored, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The U.S. must lead the world on 5G, which is critical to the U.S. economy and to export democratic values “to the rest of the world,” she said. Rosenworcel spoke with Clete Johnson, CSIS senior fellow.

DLA Piper’s Smitty Smith is leaving the law firm to replace Kathleen Ham as T-Mobile senior vice president-government affairs, when Ham retires Oct. 2, T-Mobile said Thursday. Smith’s title will be senior vice president-public policy and government affairs. Smith is a former FCC and NTIA staffer, who was once seen as a contender to chair the FCC under President Joe Biden (see 2101010001). Smith was also a member of the Biden FCC transition team. At the FCC, he was an aide to former Chairman Tom Wheeler and led the Incentive Auction Task Force. Ham is a longtime T-Mobile official and an FCC veteran where she was deputy chief of the Wireless Bureau and the first chief of the spectrum auctions program, working on some of the first FCC auctions. “Kathleen’s contributions to T-Mobile are numerous,” a spokesperson emailed: “Over nearly 20 years at T-Mobile, she has played a critical role in driving key policy and regulatory efforts, including the completion of the transformational T-Mobile/Sprint merger and obtaining critical spectrum assets that have secured the company’s 5G leadership position.”

The U.S. shouldn’t look to the citizens broadband radio service band as a model for future sharing if only because it’s based on old technology and doesn’t reflect advances in sharing technology, said Peter Rysavy of Rysavy Research at an American Enterprise Institute 5G forum Thursday. Other experts said the U.S. will be hobbled on spectrum until Congress reauthorizes FCC spectrum auction authority.

Capitol Hill may be on course to tackle a trifecta of major FCC and communications policy matters during the final week before Congress begins the month-plus August recess, including Senate floor votes on Democratic commission nominee Anna Gomez, but lawmakers cautioned Thursday afternoon that action on those issues remained uncertain. Senate Democrats were urging Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to file cloture on Gomez in hopes of setting up floor votes next week on the nominee, whose confirmation would bring the FCC to a 3-2 Democratic majority more than two years into President Joe Biden’s term.

Cablers discussed the importance of unlicensed spectrum and called for a shared spectrum “pipeline,” in a meeting with an aide to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. They also discussed the importance of the citizens broadband radio service band and a CBRS-like approach to sharing. The wireless industry has stressed the importance of “pipeline” of licensed spectrum as 5G takes off (see 2209260048). “To keep pace with … ever-growing consumer and industry demand, it is essential to continually build a robust pipeline of unlicensed and shared-licensed spectrum resources, and ensure that each band’s operating requirements allow consumers to experience its maximum benefits,” said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 18-295. “The largest national wireless carriers, manufacturers, utilities, schools, hospitals, energy companies, neutral host networks, like stadiums and convention centers, municipalities, and small and rural wireless” are “actively using CBRS for a variety of wireless services,” the cable interests said: “Many new, non-traditional providers, like manufacturers, hospitals, and schools, were able to access commercial spectrum for the first time because of CBRS’ innovative sharing regime and licensing rules, which allowed them to compete at auction and tailor smaller license sizes to their specialized network needs.” Among those at the meeting were NCTA, Comcast, Charter Communications, Cox Enterprises and CableLabs.

Industry officials say they’re hearing little about when the FCC will approve final rules for the 5.9 GHz band. FCC commissioners approved an order in November 2020 opening 45 MHz of the band for Wi-Fi, while allocating 30 MHz for cellular vehicle-to-everything technology. Follow-up work remains.

Martin Cooper, known as the inventor of the cellphone as a Motorola technologist, is a skeptic of wireless industry arguments about a pending spectrum crisis. The world “is just at the beginning of the cellular revolution,” he said on a Cooley webinar Thursday, interviewed by former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. The standard story is that spectrum “is like beachfront property -- when you use it all up, there isn’t anymore,” Cooper said. “How can that be true?” When Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the first radio, he used all the available spectrum for most of the world, Cooper said. Fifty years later “we had a million times more capacity, and believe it or not, another 50 years” later “and we did another million times,” he said: “Somehow or other, technology has stayed ahead of the game forever, and we have never had a scarcity of spectrum.” The technology already exists to make much more efficient use of spectrum, he said. The challenge “is to change our perception of spectrum, to get people to understand that we’ve got to … share the spectrum,” he said. McDowell noted Cooper developed what some call “Cooper’s Law,” that spectral efficiency doubles every 30 months and becomes exponential over time. Cooper’s wife, Arlene Harris, who co-founded wireless technology company Dyna with him in 1986, said on the webinar the expiration of the FCC’s auction authority in March could be a good thing for the wireless industry. “Good for Congress -- let’s starve the carriers,” Harris said. The carriers will then have to put pressure on their suppliers to develop technological solutions to capacity issues, she said. The technology Cooper developed in the 1990s “would have improved [network] capacity a ton, and yet the commission goes off and sells more spectrum -- the carriers had no reason to implement that technology,” Harris said: “They were buying spectrum and parking it.” Cooper envisions a world without exclusive licenses for spectrum. Allocations would be done “on the fly,” he said. Someone who wants to make a call would ask for a channel “and that channel is created instantaneously over the optimum frequency, the optimum amount of power,” he said: “We reconfigure as things change. That is the way systems should work. We are a long way away from that today, but that is how we’re going to get another million times capacity in spectrum capacity, and it’s all doable” with the right processing, smart antennas and other technology. The government is going to have to convince carriers to share spectrum, which won’t be easy, he said. “Carriers today think they own the spectrum -- they don’t own the spectrum, they have a license to use it,” Cooper said.

The FCC appears unlikely to grant T-Mobile special temporary authority to launch service in the markets where it won licenses in last year’s 2.5 GHz auction, which ended almost a year ago. The agency declined to award the licenses, or grant a STA, after its auction authority expired earlier this year (see 2304260058).

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Northstar Wireless' cert petition on the FCC's denying designated entity AWS-3 auction credits to Northstar and another Dish Network (see 2301230007), per a notice Friday in docket 22-672. The court said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't take part in the consideration or decision. The cert petition denial raises the prospects of a re-auction of spectrum soon, New Street Research's Blair Levin wrote in an investors' note Friday. The FCC doesn't have auction authority now, but that probably will be restored in 2023's second half, he said. Dish already paid $515 million and would be on the hook for any shortfall in a re-auction of the licenses, said Levin, though he deems such a shortfall unlikely.

North America is leading the world in the uptake of 5G with 41% of subscribers signed up for the new generation of wireless at the end of last year, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, released Wednesday. Ericsson projected a 25% compound annual growth rate in mobile network data traffic through 2028. “Managing this growth while improving the mobile user experience requires continued network evolution,” the report said: “Notably, 5G mid-band build-out is proving to be more energy-efficient and cost-effective compared to the expansion of 4G networks.” 5G subscriptions are increasing in every region of the world and forecast to reach 1.5 billion by the end of 2023. Some 240 commercial 5G networks have been launched so far, Ericsson found. India is having the fastest growth anywhere. Following the launch of 5G in October, “the 5G market is witnessing huge network deployments under its Digital India initiative,” the report said: India reached 10 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2022 and 5G is projected to account for about 57% of mobile subscriptions there by the end of 2028. Paroma Sanyal, co-leader of the Telecom, Media and Internet practice at the Brattle Group, said Wednesday new numbers from Ericsson show Brattle potentially underestimated growth in an April report commissioned by CTIA (see 2304170009). That report said without new spectrum bands allocated for licensed use, the U.S. could face a 400 MHz deficit by 2027 and 1,400 MHz by 2032. “We thought a 23% CAGR was quite high, but now they’re projecting even higher,” said Sanyal, former chief economist at the FCC Wireless Bureau, during a Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy webcast. She said what the data flow will look like remains unclear. “We have seen so much fixed wireless deployment under 5G, so it’s not just the mobile network,” she said. There will probably be a lot more “data hungry” apps in use, she said. Improved spectral efficiency won’t be enough to keep up with projected data demand, she said, adding that while people say you can put in more towers, “there’s a physical limit to how many towers you can put in, how spectrum can be reused because of interference issues. So there’s always physical limit to what else you can do.” At least 64% of the projected demand needs to be satisfied by increased spectrum availability, she said. Sanyal predicted that once FCC auction authority is restored the lower 3 GHz band will be the next target for full-power licensed use.