Top wireless carrier and trade association officials Wednesday urged NTIA Administrator Larry...

spectrum auction. The leading technology around the world for commercial mobile broadband is Long Term Evolution (LTE), using standards defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project. “Carriers around the world have plans to deploy LTE consistent with 3GPP band plans,” said the letter, signed by CTIA, 4G Americas, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. “The 1755-1780 MHz band, when paired with the 2155-2180 MHz band, aligns closely with 3GPP Band Class 10. Pairing the 1755-1780 MHz band with the 2155-2180 MHz band would allow this spectrum to be auctioned and licensed by February 2015, as the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission recently noted.” Rather than focusing on the entire 1755-1850 MHz band, “at some point in the distant future we strongly urge that NTIA focus the effort on reallocation of the 1755-1780 MHz sub-band as soon as possible,” the letter said. The letter came as the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces held a hearing on spectrum issues. Wireless carriers remain focused on getting exclusive-use spectrum, where possible, instead of shared spectrum, CTIA Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe said at the hearing. He pressed in particular for the reallocation of the 1755-1780 MHz band for wireless broadband after it’s cleared of the Department of Defense and other incumbents. “What’s in there?” he asked. “What needs to be moved or what can be retuned? What can we help to upgrade?” Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, deputy chief information officer at DOD, countered key DOD operations are in the spectrum. Wheeler noted that the broader 1755-1850 MHz band contains many of the operations formerly in the 1710-1755 MHz band, which was previously auctioned by the FCC in the AWS-1 auction. To just make the 1755-1780 MHz band available, DOD would have to “redo all of the systems” in the broader band, he said. “We're looking at airborne platforms that go across the whole United States that actually span that whole band,” he said. “We actually have satellite control functions that are in the 1755-1780 area. Of those 100 systems most come across that whole area. That’s really the problem.” But Wheeler acknowledged that DOD has yet to do a specific study of the costs of clearing just the 1755-1780 MHz band. “That … is definitely something that we can do,” he said. Wheeler also stressed the importance of spectrum sharing. “We agree that sharing is a methodology for the future,” he said. Guttman-McCabe said carriers in the U.S. are falling behind their peers internationally in terms of the amount of spectrum they have available for broadband. “The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, Canada, all of these countries have brought hundreds of megahertz of cleared spectrum to market in the last year,” he said. “They're all a fraction of our size, have a fraction of our usage.”