Co-Primary Status Becoming Major Stumbling Block to FSS/5G Sharing
Fixed satellite service and terrestrial wireless camps remain at odds over whether satellite has co-primary terrestrial status, representatives from both sides said in interviews Thursday. They said the dispute is a major stumbling block to any deal between the industries on sharing high-spectrum bands for FSS and 5G. The sides made their case to the FCC in filings this week in docket 14-177. Satellite and terrestrial broadband industry officials said they expect the agency to proceed with its plan (see 1605250063) to vote at July's meeting on a spectrum frontiers NPRM.
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They said that item could say how the FCC proposes to deal with the FSS/wireless conflict. The agency didn't comment.
There's a "fundamental misunderstanding" about current spectrum allocation, the Satellite Industry Association said in a filing Wednesday in docket 14-177. "When the basic tenet of FSS' co-primary status is not recognized by terrestrial service providers, it is not possible to achieve agreement." SIA urged the agency to make clear FSS and terrestrial will be co-primary in the 28 GHz band.
The co-primary status matter "is a red herring," since testing has shown upper microwave flexible use (UMFU) operations don't interfere with FSS, but the opposite isn't necessarily true and co-primary status would let FSS operators put earth stations anywhere, raising the odds of interference to UMFU deployments, a terrestrial wireless executive told us. Terrestrial broadband interests like CTIA (see 1605200057) and T-Mobile (see 1605270047) have disputed that FSS is co-primary in the 28 GHz and 37-40 GHz bands, while satellite interests argued the opposite (see 1605260061 and 1605110065).
Since meetings between satellite and terrestrial wireless operators have failed to come up with consensus on aggregate interference issues in 5G sharing between FSS and UMFU, SIA said the FCC should convene a three-party technical meeting to let the FSS and terrestrial sides put forth data on and solutions for aggregate interference to satellite receivers. It also said it has put together five separate meetings over the past 10 weeks with wireless industry representatives at which it provided FSS earth station and satellite technical parameters, while individual SIA members held other meetings on their own. The wireless executive said the industry similarly would be willing to meet.
The data coming from FSS interests "has been sorely lacking," some terrestrial broadband companies said in a separate filing in the docket Wednesday. AT&T, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, T-Mobile and Verizon said they asked for but didn't receive such data as typical signal power at the satellite, filter characteristics and receiver sensitivity, satellite gain contours. AT&T et al. also cited numerous criticisms of a satellite industry proposal for power limits on UMFU emissions and pushed a Nokia-conducted simulation for assessing interference between terrestrial mobile broadband and FSS in the 28 GHz band -- the simulation results filed with the FCC in May. They said further refinements of the simulation "reinforces the conclusion ... that regulations on UMFU licensees are unnecessary to protect FSS operations."
The satellite industry has become shy about sharing technical details while the co-primary status issue hasn't been resolved, the satellite executive told us. An FCC-convened meeting on technical details would be useful once that overhanging matter is resolved, the executive said.