Carr Weighing Next FCC Steps to Promote 5G
Commissioner Brendan Carr said Wednesday he's still figuring out what the FCC should propose to address impediments to broadband deployment posed by local and state governments and on siting on federal lands. Carr said the FCC’s job is to get the regulation right while industry has to figure out a business plan. Wireless Infrastructure Association President Jonathan Adelstein worries how carriers will monetize the costs of building 5G. Both spoke at the Wireless Connect event.
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Carr was asked whether he’s concerned about the price of possibly $275 billion in the U.S. “Carriers would be much better situated than me” to discuss the economic case, Carr said. “My job as a regulator is to make sure that regulation isn’t the thing standing in the way. We want to see 5G deployed, as vigorously as possible, based on the economics that are out there, based on where the technological development is.” Cutting the cost of regulation helps make the business case for deployment, he said. “I defer to people that have been to business school to figure that out exactly.”
Adelstein told us he's “certainly” concerned about how carriers will “monetize” such investments. “It’s not yet clear what those revenue streams are,” he said. “The FCC has taken all the steps they can to try to open new opportunities to pay for the network as well as removing expensive regulatory hurdles.” With unlimited plans increasingly common, consumers end up getting more data for less money, he said. “At some point, somebody has got to pay for all this.”
Companies like Facebook and Google will have huge benefits from 5G but don’t have to make network investments, Adelstein said. “How do we make this fair for everyone involved?” he asked. “The FCC has tried to level the playing field.” It’s not “yet clear what the business case is,” he said. The old saying is if you build it, they will come, Adelstein said. “They will come, but they will not be companies whose profits accrue to the carriers that have to make the network investments.” Google and Facebook didn't comment.
Carr, charged by Chairman Ajit Pai with overseeing FCC work on wireless infrastructure, told us he hasn’t made a decision on what the agency should do next. “We’re continuing to look at the record,” he said. “We’re continuing to watch the developments and the work product that BDAC [the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee] is putting out. We’re going to continue to study that.”
“There are a lot of challenges getting more broadband to more Americans,” Carr told the conference. “A lot of it is going to require infrastructure. A lot of it is going to require spectrum and we’re working hard on those two things.” The massive IoT and new technologies like remote surgery and autonomous driving will require the upgrades 5G offers, he said. “We need an upgrade on our wireless network,” he said. “That’s what 5G is about.”
After addressing tribal, historic and environmental issues at commissioners' March meeting (see 1803220027), the FCC will turn its attention to local and state impediments, Carr said. Work also remains on siting on federal lands, he said. The rule changes approved last month will save industry millions of dollars -- 30 percent of the costs of a deployment have been for historic and environmental reviews, he said. Cutting regulation costs will mean more deployments in more communities, Carr said. “We’re going to flip the business case.”
Building out 5G in rural areas will be difficult, but cutting regulation helps, Carr said, citing a visit he made to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to tour deployments by small carrier Shentel. The company allocates about $35 million a year to capital expenditures, he said. “By cutting regulatory red tape,” Shentel will be able to deploy 13 additional cellsites per year, he said.
“Some communities have been doing a great job,” Adelstein said. “Some communities are cutting edge, doing the job right. How do you get everybody up to that standard?”
Conference Notebook
Smart cities aren’t waiting for 5G, said John Wilson, Hitachi director-America business development, on a panel. “We have several thousand IoT solutions that are to market, that are being sold, that are implemented in 70 cities across the country,” he said. “How much bandwidth do you need for certain applications?” Applications like sensors on the roads that detect potholes will never need 5G, Wilson said. Fifth-generation wireless is for applications that need very high throughput and very low latency “and you don’t need that for everything IoT,” he said. Elizabeth Rojas Levi, Nokia director-public affairs, said if autonomous vehicles take off, all cities will need 5G. “We’re going to need high-, mid- and low-band spectrum for that,” she said. “The same for remote surgery.” For those types of applications, “we’re going to need more small cells, we’re going to need better connectivity,” she said. Some view these new technologies as something out of the The Jetsons, she said. “Not really. This stuff is already happening. It’s just that it hasn’t scaled yet and it hasn’t scaled globally.”