Questions Remain After WRC That Some Call Qualified Success

For the FCC, top goals were “safeguarding 24 GHz,” ensuring ability to offer broadband in 28 GHz, and preserving the 5 GHz band for sharing with unlicensed, O’Rielly testified Dec. 5. “The conference achieved some of these objectives in various, muddied forms.” The conference, like WRC-15, “raised some fundamental concerns that ultimately call into question the continued value” of the conference, O’Rielly said. “It was very evident that certain foreign delegations were sent with clear directions to oppose the United States and other forward-thinking nations.” The U.S. should consider working toward a “G7-like organization or loose coalition of leading wireless nations,” O’Rielly said. He's critical of out-of-band-emission limits in the 24 GHz band aimed at protecting passive weather satellites in adjacent spectrum. The world now faces a limit of -33 dBW/200 MHz for 5G base stations until 2027, when it switches to -39 dBW, he said.

The process was “incredibly problematic,” O’Rielly said after last week’s FCC meeting: “The United States would be well within its rights to consider other alternatives.” The decision on the 24 GHz band was bad for 5G, he said. “We had a unified government position from the United States on -20,” he said. Eight years from now “you’re either going to have to redeploy or rip out what you have. That’s incredibly problematic to those who have bought licenses in our auction.” A few countries are “trying to use the WRC process to make it worse,” he said.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was still weighing how the WRC went last week. He's “grateful” the U.S. presented a unified position on the 24 GHz band, he said in Q&A last week. “The end result that was reached is one that we believe will allow us to move the ball forward.” Some other countries “were looking to essentially slow down or even block the development of that band for purposes of 5G applications and services,” he said. The FCC and the head of the WRC-19 delegation didn't comment Tuesday.

The last WRC was very successful on many levels, David Gross of Wiley Rein told us. “Overall,” industry people with a lot at stake are “quite pleased with the outcome,” said Gross, who oversaw U.S. work at two WRCs under President George W. Bush. “That’s not always the case.” After WRC-15, “there was a lot of concern about some of the outcomes,” Gross said: The U.S. delegation “did a first rate job with a lot of controversial issues.”

Gross said the issues O’Rielly raises are important. “WRCs have always been difficult because of the need to have consensus across 190 and some countries, many of whom have very differing interests, that have very different incumbent users of spectrum and the like,” he said. “It’s always a complicated process.” An ITU core tenet is that all countries maintain sovereignty over their own radiowaves, he said. “There is nothing that happens at a WRC … that requires the FCC to do or not to do anything within the United States. Yes, it affects borders, and yes, it affects global relationships, but within the United States the FCC remains the sole decision-maker.”

The world is seeing more regional decisions and that's likely to continue, Gross said. That’s not “necessarily at the expense of the global decisions that the ITU makes at WRCs, but rather as a practical safety valve to allow groups of countries in a given region to make their own more independent decisions,” he said.

There was much discussion about 28 GHz at WRC-15 and the U.S. was upset the band “was not in the mix” for international mobile telecom (IMT) at the 2019 conference, said Colin Thomson, Access Partnership head of practice-infrastructure. The U.S., Japan, Korea and Singapore were unique in pressing for a discussion that never occurred because 28 GHz wasn’t on the agenda for IMT, he told us. “While we might not have the economies of scale of global identification, nothing is stopping the operation of services in the band domestically.”

Thomson noted the U.S. didn’t get what it was looking for at WRC-15 on the use of the 600 MHz band for broadband, but that didn’t stop the TV incentive auction. The U.S. is deploying “on its own without the ITU backing,” he said. Industry is looking for opportunities to develop “national or regional frameworks … outside of the ITU,” he said. The U.S. can still comply with international radio regulations without seeking specific language on how a band can be used, he said. Thomson sees a similar case in the use of the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi in the U.S. and Europe.

Tom Struble, tech policy manager at the R Street Institute, understands why O’Rielly “would come away from the conference feeling that private standard-setting organizations, like 3GPP [3rd Generation Partnership Project] and IEEE, are more helpful than the … ITU in terms of globally harmonizing spectrum policy and achieving the corresponding scale economies and consumer benefits.”

The disputes at WRC over some bands “closely mirrors the spectrum disputes” within the U.S. government, Struble said. O’Rielly’s “frustration with one process may be bleeding into the other,” he said. “While the FCC has recently been doing everything in its power to promote deployment of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and other next-gen wireless services, their progress has been stymied left and right by other federal agencies,” he said: “With the U.S. delegation to WRC-19 unable to present a unified front on issues in 5 GHz, 6 GHz, 24 GHz, and elsewhere, it seems that other nations seized on that uncertainty to protect their own interests. That's a problem ... that could've been avoided or at least minimized if we had done a better job coordinating federal spectrum policy beforehand.”