Oil Companies, Electric Utilities Concerned About 3.5 GHz Protections
FCC proposals to protect grandfathered 3650 MHz-3700 MHz base stations from harmful interference from Citizens Broadband Radio Service users in the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band don’t go far enough, the American Petroleum Institute said in comments filed at the…
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FCC. Comments were due Monday on the protection framework and protection criteria during the transition to spectrum sharing. “API believes that the FCC protection boundary proposal in this docket is less than adequate for over half of the use cases for existing equipment,” the oil and gas association said. “Examples of unregistered operations around a registered base station that would be affected by the FCC proposal include such things as support vessels in the Gulf of Mexico that surround a platform, or mobile work locations within an oil field.” API sought tighter limits on interference. The Utilities Telecom Council also sought tougher protections for utility operations in the band. UTC said the rules should protect customer premises equipment (CPE) farther than the 4.4 km from the center coordinates of the base station proposed by the FCC. “Second, the Grandfathered Wireless Protection Zone should extend in all directions around the center coordinates of the base station, not just to those sectors where there is existing CPE.” The comments were in docket 12-354. Google also encouraged the FCC to develop an approach that protects incumbents from interference. Google proposed the FCC establish as an aggregate received signal strength limit of -95 dBm/MHz (or -85dBm/10 MHz) at locations where equipment is located “rather than creating inefficient protection zones.” Companies with equipment that must be protected during the transition should also have to register with a database, Google said in its comments.