Compromise on 3.5 GHz Band May Not Necessarily Mean Larger PALs
Many questions remain about the rules for the future of the 3.5 GHz band, but industry officials said a compromise appears to be in the works that could leave census tracts in place as the primary license size for the priority access licenses (PALs), the licensed component of the shared band. Industry officials said the path to approval will be much smoother if FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly agrees to leave the license sizes as they are in the original rules, rather than pressing for larger license geographies that wireless ISPs and others say would be too big for everyone but the carriers. The FCC didn’t comment.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The FCC received many comments, from WISPs and others last week, asking it to license the PALs as census tracts (see 1712290016), the size of licenses in the Obama-era rules. The FCC in 2012 approved the initial 3.5 GHz NPRM (see 1212130044), which established an experimental three-tiered access and sharing model made up of federal and nonfederal incumbents, PALs and general authorized access users. But in October, commissioners agreed to seek comment on revising the rules (see 1710240050), addressing concerns raised by O’Rielly about how to ensure interest in the PALs.
Verizon and a few commenters hope the FCC will opt for license terms of 10 years, instead of the current three years, with an expectation of renewability, and larger geographic sizes. Larger license areas would “stimulate investment, promote innovation, and encourage efficient use of spectrum resources,” Verizon said in comments in docket 17-258. Verizon said partial economic areas (PEAs) are already a compromise: “When the Commission first adopted PEAs in 2014, it concluded that PEAs strike a careful balance between large and small geographic license area sizes and would meet the needs of smaller, rural operators seeking access to spectrum resources.”
The FCC should “license PALs on a PEA basis to simplify licensing, enable flexible and targeted networks, and reduce border areas and accompanying risks for interference,” CTIA said. Cable operators expressed enthusiasm for county-sized PALs.
Proponents of keeping census tracts for the PALs said they hope O’Rielly will agree with all of the comments that call for not changing to PEAs or another license size.
O’Rielly is “a diligent and thoughtful person -- he reads everything in the record, and he is a straight shooter,” said Jimmy Carr, CEO of All Points Broadband, on behalf of the Wireless ISP Association. “If he looks at the comments that have been filed, it’s sure to have an impact.” Carr said in an interview that WISPA might be willing to support a compromise, including five-year licensing terms, with an expectation of renewal for an additional five years. There’s also “clear consensus in the record” that all seven PALs should be available in every market and reasonably broad consensus on emissions limits, he said.
The NPRM doesn’t propose to increase PAL size, “it just asks for input,” Carr said. “If you look at the comments, there’s broad consensus among everyone but the carriers that we should keep PAL sizes as is.” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC shouldn’t pick winners and losers, Carr said: “Changing PALs to cover much larger areas would anoint big mobile as the winners and everyone else as the losers.” Carr said that increasing the size of license areas beyond census tracts “would be a catastrophic loss for wireless ISPs and rural America.” Everyone agrees rural broadband “is the commission’s top priority,” he said. “Everyone knows that fixed wireless is a major part of the solution because it’s so cost-effective. But we won’t close the gap without licensed access to mid-band spectrum, because our existing spectrum resources can’t penetrate trees and obstacles. Mid-band spectrum can, and everyone knows this is the only mid-band spectrum that will be available in the foreseeable future.”
Comments filed last week show “overwhelming support to maintain very small license areas and competitive license renewal,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America. “This support ranged from General Electric and rural broadband providers, to cities, hotels, and other venues and industry verticals. Only the large national carriers, their captive suppliers and trade associations support changing this innovative new framework aimed at expanding localized access to spectrum with interference protection.” Calabrese said he's hopeful commissioners will take the record seriously and agree that “a robust 5G wireless ecosystem is promoted best by rejecting an industrial policy that limits licensed spectrum to the big mobile carriers.”
Since the mid-1990s, the FCC’s wireless focus “has been almost entirely on commercial carriers planning to offer mass market mobile services,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge. “The 3.5 GHz rules and the focus on small license areas was an effort to address this deficiency and provide opportunities for interference protection for enterprise customers and others who are not looking to offer a mass market mobile service,” like businesses looking to operate wide area networks on corporate campuses, he said. “The commission should keep this innovative feature of the existing regulations,” he said. Consistently imposing license sizes only useful for mass-market wireless services “has the same effect as traditional command and control in terms of shutting out just about every other possible business case, particularly in the major markets where no one but the largest carriers can hope to win licenses,” he said.