RF Exposure Fears Seen as Hurdle to 5G Small-Cell Deployments
Often, conflicts with localities about small-cell deployment aesthetic issues are a proxy for the underlying concern, which is RF safety, some said at Friday's FCC Technological Advisory Council meeting, its first for 2019. Local opposition is often framed in terms of densification issues, but "the elephant in the room" is RF exposure, said Dale Hatfield, executive fellow at Silicon Flatirons.
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During an antenna technology working group discussion about efforts to address the small-cell deployment aesthetics red flags localities often raise, Hatfield said such a focus ignores the underlying concern and such fights will continue unabated. The local opposition is often "badly misinformed ... but that's part of the problem," he said.
Working group co-chair Marty Cooper, of Dyna, said the FCC might want to involve itself in public education on the polarized issue. The agency didn't comment. Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said "stay tuned" to the FCC's open proceeding on RF safety issues. He said the FCC doesn't intend to have RF exposure to be part of TAC's work, but the agency does work with other agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.
To try to help speed the approvals process for small cells by localities, the TAC antenna working group plans to assemble a multistakeholder group of interests including engineers, architects, the wireless industry, municipalities and tower companies to discuss small cell aesthetics and ways of avoiding suburban fears of "poles erected all over," said WG co-Chair Greg Lapin of ARRL. He said if carriers could share small cells, that would help assuage such concerns. He said despite FCC efforts to speed deployments such as through establishing a shot clock requiring a 60- to 90-day review of an application, communities have learned ways around that by, for example, requesting small changes in details that reset the clock. Lapin said municipality representation on that multistakeholder group could help sand down municipal resistance
New York University Wireless founding Director Ted Rappaport said with the move into higher frequencies and use of adaptive arrays, understanding how those arrays work and how they measure energy would be a good focus for TAC.
There was discussion about what role 5G could play in rural connectivity. Alianza adviser John Barnhill said the biggest rural need is coverage, while 5G's strength is in speed, and rural markets also carry particularly high backhaul, interconnect and antenna costs. 5G "is not a silver bullet" for rural connectivity, and the fix will require a mix of satellite, Wi-Fi, LTE, better antenna designs and rural funding that incentivizes investment in lower density areas, he said.
Rappaport said 5G "is the best thing that ever could have happened to rural." He said mmWave spectrum and a line of sight in a rural area can accomplish the same as mid-band spectrum in a more urban area, and fixed point-to-point backhaul using the 27, 37 and 39 GHz bands could replace aging copper. Carriers could be motivated by regulatory approaches that emphasize that kind of deployment, he said. "No one's going to do it on their own."
Cooper said the rural digital divide threatens to be a "digital chasm" for education, with one possible response being private enterprise being incentivized for rural deployment by allowing use of schools and libraries as cell sites. He said the FCC also could prioritize rural spectrum availability to operators providing coverage for education.
AT&T Assistant Vice President-Standards and Industry Alliances Brian Daly said projections point to 10 million 5G subscriptions in the U.S. by year's end, and that by 2024 5G networks will carry 35 percent of the globe's mobile traffic. Various carriers are involved in 95 5G city deployments now across the U.S., he said.
Daly said the potentially billions of IoT devices in the field within a few years will easily outstrip IPv4 capacity. He said deploying 5G with IPv6 protocol would still support IPv4 but also handle that traffic.