FCC Working Group To Explore Issues Raised by Sky Full of Drones

“The skies are filling with radios,” said Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology. From time to time questions are raised like “why don’t we all just use Wi-Fi?” and “what is that going to do to operations on the ground?” Knapp said. The working group needs to start by figuring out what questions it can tackle because it can't take on everything, he said. “Nobody is thinking about spectrum for drones,” Knapp said.

Geosatellites have been in the sky providing service for a long time “and now there is a lot of company,” said Steve Lanning, ViaSat vice president-operations and co-chair of the new working group. “The question comes as to what does that mean for everybody else, not only people who are in space but for people who are on the ground as well.” Lanning said it is his understanding the FCC plans a rulemaking on some of the issues to be examined by the working group.

Drones have the potential to provide communications when towers go down during a disaster, Lanning said. “If you were to put drones up, or supplement them with some kind of geocapacity, then you would suddenly have service,” he said.

Some issues don’t require immediate action and just need to be monitored, and it's important to sort through that, Lanning said. Then there’s the question of “who might be getting edged out, what services might not be getting the attention that they need but could be of value,” he said. “Those kind of conflicts seem to me the kind of things we need to be able to highlight and technically explain.” The first thing the working group will do is collect data, he said.

Knapp said in opening remarks TAC has played an important role in such areas as the FCC’s launch of a shared spectrum band at 3.5 GHz and the IP transition. The current examination of high-frequency spectrum came out of work done by TAC, Knapp said. Wheeler instructed staff to have an order ready on high band spectrum this summer, he said. “That’s probably one of the biggest [items] that the commission is focused on right now.” Knapp said he knows it will “inevitably be called the 5G proceeding.”

Unlicensed Remains a Focus

TAC also recommended the FCC look for more spectrum for unlicensed use, Knapp said. “Most of you probably know we have quite a few things going on on unlicensed right now including, for example, we’re still in the process of trying to roll out TV white spaces, update the rules there,” he said. The FCC “is trying to get to yes” on the use of the 5350-5470 MHz and 5.9 GHz bands for unlicensed, he said. “There’s a lot of work going on there,” he said.

“Even though most of the groups are continuing, the topics have changed and the questions have changed,” said TAC Chairman Dennis Roberson, Illinois Institute of Technology vice provost-research.

Among the continuing areas of discussion, TAC’s next-generation Internet services working group is working on more recommendations on its proposed changes to the Measuring Broadband America (MBA) program, unveiled at the TAC’s last meeting in December (see 1512090067), members said Wednesday. The group recommended the program be expanded to include quality of service (QOS) and quality of experience measurements, in addition to measuring connection speeds.

Russ Gyurek, Cisco director-Innovation Labs and co-chair of the working group, said the FCC’s collection of QOS information raises many questions. “I think the real question is where does this data end up,” he said. “Is this a data observatory/repository? How do we ensure the security and privacy of users? … What’s the commission going to do with the collected data?”

Understanding Internet in the Home

There's little data on Internet service within the home, Gyurek said. That issue has been ignored, he said. “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the in-home network,” he said. “The MBA program collects data to a white box at the home [from] a white box in the ISP. What is lacking is what happens in the home.”

The cybersecurity working group plans to focus, in part, on 5G security, said co-chair Paul Steinberg, Motorola Solutions chief technology officer. The FCC asked the TAC to get ahead of the 5G standardization process and use the group’s previous work on the IoT as a “key use case” for 5G. “The request was for 5G broadly and as far as I can tell there aren’t really too many communications problems on the planet that 5G doesn’t look to address in some way,” he said. “At its nutshell, it’s next-generation mobile broadband. That’s the most fundamental application.”

The group’s look at 5G is different from much of its past focus because it isn’t about solving a current problem, Steinberg said. “The real strong impetus from the FCC is 5G hasn’t left the gate completely yet, so let’s see if we can get in front of this,” he said.

The TAC’s game-changing technologies working group will also look at 5G, said working group co-chair Adam Drobot of OpenTechWorks. The group will look at the technical challenges in developing 5G and what can be done to ensure deployment in the U.S, he said. The group also wants to look at what 5G will enable, he said. Topics to be discussed include network densification and the use of small cells, how 5G will advance spectral efficiency and the use of high-frequency spectrum, Drobot said.

The group will also look at programmable networks, Drobot said. “There it’s to take a look at business models, service regimes, and, really, what there is in the regulatory policy arena that anticipates and accelerates what’s possible,” he said. The group plans a white paper on both topics, Drobot said.

David Simpson, chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau, said consideration of QOS should include the recognition that in a disaster, when communications infrastructure is damaged, “any of the remaining infrastructure, end to end, will support first national security and emergency communications.” Another consideration of TAC should be the importance of encryption in protecting cybersecurity, Simpson said. “It’s no longer just a security thing, it’s now a privacy thing and my question is, is it now a performance thing that we’re going to need to account for in the future,” he said.