3.5 GHz Band a Key Test for Spectrum Sharing, Wheeler Says
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said small cells and sharing are both commission “priorities” and provide “new opportunities for innovators and for consumers,” at the opening of a workshop on a Spectrum Access System (SAS) for the 3.5 GHz band Tuesday. The band is targeted by the FCC for sharing particularly for use by small cells. Wheeler said the daylong workshop, which offered four panels on making an SAS work, should provide the kind of detailed discussion needed. “The vision stuff, I get, that’s not hard,” he said. “How you really pull it off, that’s tough. ... We take this very seriously."
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The band is currently set aside for high-powered military radar and fixed satellite service (FSS) earth stations and satellites. The FCC’s original NPRM from 2012 proposed that the band be reallocated under a three-tiered “Citizens Broadband Service” under Part 95 of the commission’s rules (http://fcc.us/JnSv1c).
The upcoming TV incentive auction affects “how we think economically about spectrum going forward,” Wheeler said. But the 3.5 GHz discussion will help the agency “rethink now we deal with the scarcity of spectrum and the increasing demands on spectrum, going forward.”
"There has never been a time in history when there have been so many simultaneous moving parts determining the way in which we communicate and what, as a result, our future is going to look like,” Wheeler said. “We just bounce back and forth here from one big transformational kind of concept to another.” The debate is “more than an intellectual exercise,” he said. “We're talking about nothing less than defining what future decades are going to look like and how future decades are going to communicate.”
The topic is so hot the start of the workshop was delayed so the numerous attendees could get through security and into the commission’s meeting room. “If you conducted a survey and you said there is going to be an overflow crowd meeting that is going to backup security at the FCC how many of you would have estimated the topic was 3.5?” Wheeler asked. “But I mean the very fact that you're here is an incredibly significant statement.”
Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, said a line to get into a technical workshop was enough to “warm the heart” of an FCC engineer. “As envisioned, the Spectrum Access System would expand on the extensive work that the commission and industry stakeholders had done in the TV white spaces,” he said. “It would create a more dynamic and responsive spectrum management database.”
Key questions include how to define the specific architecture and capabilities of an SAS, the functional requirements that should be imposed on the system and the base stations connected to it and the types of information that must be transmitted between the base stations and the SAS, Knapp said. Managing interference and protecting 3.5 GHz incumbents are also key concerns, he said. “It’s our hope that today’s workshop will guide us toward a set of acceptable parameters for this spectrum access system,” he said. “We recognize this is complex. As the chairman noted, this is the hard part. ... But it’s absolutely achievable.”
The 3.5 GHz discussion touches on “our job at the FCC,” which is “to keep pace with new technologies,” said acting Wireless Bureau Chief Roger Sherman on the agency’s blog (http://fcc.us/1cjGPE3). “Several of the central and most novel questions in this proceeding revolve around the SAS,” he wrote. “What functions should it perform? How will it manage multiple tiers of spectrum access? Should there be multiple third-party SAS providers, and how would they interact with one another and the FCC? How can we ensure the integrity of the system to protect existing uses of the band?”