BDAC Members Agree to Meet Next Week on COVID-19 Permitting Issues

“The volume of problems that we’re seeing is quite large and this isn’t a drill,” said Wireless Infrastructure Association President Jonathan Adelstein. He called for a push to make sure new infrastructure can be built in the COVID-19 era. “We’re seeing increased demand for both voice and data over mobile networks” and “wireline is experiencing even greater increases,” he said: “Traffic is moving from urban to suburban more than the suburban networks were prepared to handle.”

“Maybe we could ask our localities on the line to have a dialogue with us about how we work together,” Adelstein said. Industry understands local governments are facing huge issues, he said. As a result, siting requests are getting “put on the back burner,” he said. He said his email box is flooded with complaints from members facing delays. “What can we do together?” he asked. Adelstein isn't seeking a new working group, which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai would need to approve, but he hopes for independent discussions. Timing is critical, he said.

Wireless ISP Association members have similar complaints, said President Claude Aiken. “There’s incredible demands on the ground for new deployment to reach communities with students who do not have a robust broadband connection at home today,” Aiken said. “We’re looking for creative solutions here.”

Eve Lewis, assistant city attorney in Coconut Creek, Florida, said every municipality has unique issues. “We are pulled in many directions,” she said. “It’s going to depend only on the nature of the installation. What the request is. Would it traditionally have needed a permit.” The locality “wants to make sure that we are not the bottleneck.”

Most cities have emergency clauses allowing providers to do the work they need to do and then apply for a permit, said David Young, with Lincoln, Nebraska, representing the National League of Cities. Young said most cities are accepting applications electronically. “I’d definitely be open to have an offline discussion,” he said.

A lot of municipalities have closed city halls and sent workers home, said Chris Nurse, AT&T assistant vice president-state legislative and regulatory affairs. They are struggling with how to do remote work. A lot already had opposed small-cell deployment and now don’t want to process applications at all during the crisis, he said. Bad actors “are giving all the good actors a black eye,” he said. Cities “are not all bad, and they are not all good, but some of them are being unreasonable,” he said.

Members agreed to start discussions offline next week.

Disaster Response

BDAC unanimously approved a report by its Disaster Response and Recovery Working Group. The report, not yet released, doesn’t focus on COVID-19 but is more relevant than ever, members said.

“Our recommendations were handled in the real world,” said Adelstein, WG vice chair: “It has gotten all too real, of late.” The recommendations “aren’t just theoretical -- we have identified a lot of real problems, we’ve called for real solutions, and they need to be implemented right away, not sitting on a shelf,” he said.

The document isn't “an index of disasters with detailed steps that governments and providers need to take,” said Red Grasso, WG chair who represents the North Carolina Department of Information Technology. He said it offers “broad recommendations for enhancing and promoting coordination.”

One example is communications companies lending generators to businesses that must stay open, and providing refueling, Grasso said. In North Carolina, “we had some broadcast stations during one of our last hurricanes that were having trouble with their preplanned fueling of their generators," he said: “They were able to reach out to emergency management and receive fuel from the state to make sure they were kept on the air, particularly for public alerts and warnings.” The wireless industry’s cooperative resiliency agreement provides a “baseline for other types of providers to look at potentially providing mutual aid or roaming agreements for each other,” Grasso said.

The report includes recommendations on implementation of preparedness plans, network monitoring, inspection and restoration and information sharing, Grasso said. After-action reports are critical, Grasso said. “The same lessons keep coming up,” he said: “Sometimes we need to just go back and make sure we are actually implementing lessons learned, so we are not repeating the same mistakes.” Industry needs to keep revising its “best practices,” he said.

The pandemic shows the importance of flexibility, Nurse said. He cited FCC approval of temporary authority for carriers to use borrow spectrum during the crisis. “We have been able to take what was an idle resource, get very expeditious approval, very expeditious implementation and provide additional capacity for consumers across the country,” Nurse said.

The study should be broad, said BDAC Chair Elizabeth Bowles of Aristotle. “There’s absolutely no way to predict every single catastrophe that could potentially happen.”

BDAC heard a progress report from its Broadband Infrastructure Deployment Job Skills and Training Opportunities WG. Group leaders said COVID-19 is increasing pressure to deploy infrastructure. “The work needs to get done but everyone is really under a lot of threats and fear,” said Chair Leticia Latino-van Splunteren, CEO of Neptuno USA. “Our workforce is really emerging as essential in this whole situation.”

“There are many unknowns while we are getting used to this normal,” said Vice Chair Rikin Thakker, who represents the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council. “We also need to start thinking about the new future of work.”