CBRS Licensing Size Disappointment Remains for Some; GAA Tier Good Enough?
That the fight over license size in the 3.5 GHz band is over didn't stop a skirmish at an FCBA CLE that ran through Monday evening. Verizon Assistant Vice President-Federal Regulatory Patrick Welsh said it's disingenuous for General Electric and other massive companies to imply they lack resources to compete with national wireless carriers in a 3.5 GHz auction.
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Michael Fitzpatrick, GE head-regulatory advocacy, global law and policy, shot back that being big is no protection against having their "C-suite thrown out in the street" if they started buying county-sized licenses for building wireless networks. Some said the general authorized access (GAA) tier for the 3.55-3.65 GHz band could suffice instead of needing auctioned spectrum
County-sized licenses are "a missed opportunity ... to really have an innovation band," said Fitzpatrick. He said the FCC's approach won't hurt IoT deployment, but a smaller collection of operators will benefit from the band. GE lobbied for licensing on a census tract basis (see 1801250022).
"There's no right license size," said Welsh, saying secondary markets will have "a huge role." Fitzpatrick said industrial players might try consortiums when eyeing spectrum in certain areas or try to get spectrum through secondary markets or in partnerships with wireless companies with the two sides sharing buildout risks and costs. All those are less efficient routes to the spectrum they had hoped to procure for localized industrial IoT (IIoT) networks covering, for example, an airport or port. Wireless ISP Association outside counsel Steve Coran of Lerman Senter said secondary markets haven't been an effective route for WISPA members, with very few able to conclude deals in the past with big carriers.
Asked about interest in using the GAA tier in the months before any spectrum auction kicks off, Welsh said Verizon sees GAA and the priority access license (PAL) tier as interchangeable and will use GAA spectrum at least near term to add network capacity. He said the company might decide GAA is sufficient and forego PALs altogether, though the latter provide interference protection. He said it wouldn't be surprising if others opt to just use GAA and not seek licensed spectrum. GE and other IIoT Coalition members will explore GAA use cases, Fitzpatrick said, but for critical infrastructure systems, GAA doesn't resolve some interference and resiliency questions. Coran said some wireless ISPs will be content with GAA, but PALs are attractive for CAF auction winners that "want to up their game."
Comsearch Business Development Director Mark Gibson said "real-world" testing of spectrum access systems (SAS) should be in January and February. The FCC would review the data and presumably OK commercial operations in the band, with commercial deployments in Q2, he added.
Google is working with the FCC to try to speed up that SAS approval process, said company spectrum engineering lead Andrew Clegg. He said Google is talking to the agency about possibly parallelizing lab testing alongside commercial deployments that are far from incumbents in the band.
GE and the rest of the IIoT Coalition are focusing on the auction rules-setting process and looking for routes for policy-making around creation of secondary markets, Fitzpatrick said. He said attention also is turning to other hands, like the 3.45-3.55 GHz band and 3.7-4.2 GHz band, where new entrants might still be able to participate, though the idea of census tract-sized licensing might be done. Coran said WISPA's focus in the auction procedures establishment will be on how the agency handles bidding credits for rural providers.
Clegg said SAS administrators have "sketched out" a process for dealing with interference and have a meeting set with the Enforcement Bureau to lay out how it could be implemented. He said it involves SAS administrators directly contacting other such administrators in what at least initially would be "a relatively manual process." He said that as SASs get more experience, that process might become automated.
SASs are so standardized that the first wave won't be very different from one another, but the second wave might feature secondary market support or better propagation models to differentiate from one another, Clegg said. He said choosing among first-wave SASs likely will be influenced by ancillary services like network planning. He said pricing for SAS services will depend on volumes and uses, and the market undoubtedly would be competitive.