GE, Port of Los Angeles Consider Small 3.5 GHz Licenses Key to Industrial IoT
The Port of Los Angeles and General Electric said they're interested in priority access licenses (PALs) that will be made available in the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band, in reply comments, but the agency must maintain the current smaller sizes for the licenses. In October, commissioners agreed to seek comment on revising rules in response to petitions by CTIA and T-Mobile (see 1710240050). In initial comments, most asked the FCC to make no changes or only modest ones (see 1712290016).
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 Port is currently pioneering the digitization of the maritime supply chain in an effort to enhance operational efficiency, reduce air emissions, and better serve the shipping community through greater transparency and reliability,” it said. “Our ability to realize the full potential of this effort relies on the ability to secure and access spectrum.” The port said the shipping industry is increasingly “looking to leverage big data” and the industrial IoT.
“With census-tract licensing … a broad range of parties will gain access to licensed spectrum and develop dynamic, diverse uses of the 3.5 GHz band,” GE said. The 3.5 GHz band is an “ideal spectrum platform” for the industrial IoT, the company said. Los Angeles said licensing the PALs on a partial economic area (PEA) basis rather than by census tracts “would drastically increase the price of licenses exponentially, from covering neighborhoods and single-site locations of several thousand people, to one of the largest metro areas.”
CTIA countered that making a few changes to rules for the PALs is critical to ensuring the band succeeds. Among the changes sought by CTIA are extending the PAL term to 10 years with an expectation of renewal and no specific performance requirements, licensing them on a PEA basis and facilitating the secondary market by permitting partitioning and disaggregation of PALs. “The modest changes to the PAL framework identified here will foster significant investment for a wide variety of use cases, including 5G; create new avenues for micro-targeted secondary market transactions; and continue to promote robust access to the 3.5 GHz Band” by general access users, the association said.
“By making modest modifications to the existing rules for the 3.5 GHz band, the Commission could strengthen the viability of the spectrum without delaying introduction of service or undermining the fundamental three-tier structure,” T-Mobile replied. “Instead, the Commission’s proposals would strengthen one of the three tiers by providing stability and incentives to encourage use of and investment in PALs.”
The proposed changes “amount to an industrial policy that would tailor licensing rules to closely fit the mobile carriers‘ wide-area business model and needlessly foreclose localized, innovative and potentially competing new users and uses by a broad range of enterprise, industrial, rural broadband and public sector users,” said the Open Technology Institute at New America and Public Knowledge. The “vast majority” of commenters agree on this point, they said.