SpaceX, WISPA Seek to Reassure NARUC on RDOF
State commissioners needn't worry about satellite and fixed wireless winning large amounts of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund money, said SpaceX and Wireless ISP Association officials Tuesday. Trust in FCC staff’s close review of short-form applications, they said on a virtual panel Tuesday at NARUC’s winter conference. NARUC is scrutinizing RDOF amid concerns by some members that unfamiliar entities won large amounts of federal funding in their states (see 2101290028).
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The Telecom Committee plans to vote Wednesday on a draft resolution urging the FCC to pore over RDOF long-form applications. The panel’s staff subcommittee unanimously cleared an amended draft Thursday asking the FCC to ensure winners follow through at promised speeds and latencies (see 2102040065).
“We fully expect to meet and exceed the RDOF milestones,” said SpaceX Director-Satellite Policy David Goldman. Elon Musk’s company won about $900 million across 35 states for its Starlink service. The company had 10,000 customers last week and “well past that this week,” said Goldman. “The proof's in the pudding. We're providing the service, and we're providing it at wide scale.” SpaceX is engaging with state regulators through eligible telecom carrier processes, he said.
SpaceX was "singled out for extensive scrutiny ” in the FCC’s short-form review, Goldman said. FCC engineers asked many tough questions, and the company is happy to answer more, he said. “There absolutely should be a lot of scrutiny.”
The agency did a rigorous, impartial review of short-form applications, and it wouldn’t be right to open the RDOF process to companies “with an ax to grind” because they didn’t win as much as they wanted, said WISPA Vice President-Policy Louis Peraertz. About 30 WISPA members won RDOF bids; one-third to one-half of them participated as consortiums, he said. That not all fixed-wireless ISPs won their bids in the auction’s gigabit tier shows the FCC was careful, Peraertz said.
Charter Communications seeks close review of RDOF long forms, said Dan Gonzalez, group vice president-state regulatory affairs. “It is really important that the FCC take a look at RDOF recipients that are promising to deliver gigabit speeds through unproven technologies.”
Expect “a much more contentious” post-auction process than seen previously due to concerns raised about some winners, said Gillan Associates Principal Joe Gillan. With long-form review and companies needing to get letters of credit, “there will be some weeding out,” but most will make it through, he predicted. While not perfect, the auction was a success because it delivered awards to 99% of eligible locations, said Gillan: It worked much better than the non-auction method it replaced.
NARUC Notebook
Open radio access networks aren’t ready for wide adoption, though such architecture has benefits down the road, said AT&T and T-Mobile officials on a panel Tuesday. ORAN “isn’t ready for prime time,” with scalability “a big issue,” said T-Mobile Senior Director-Technology and Engineering Policy John Hunter. To get 5G out quickly, carriers must rely on vendors they've used for years, and it might not be until 6G “before you’re going to see any meaningful buildout of ORAN networks.” T-Mobile wants development to continue because it could make it easier to add features, but open interfaces are too risky to adopt now, and “we do not want to take our eye off the ball and have it impede our ability to deploy 5G services.” AT&T is trying to build 5G quickly, and it would be hard to introduce ORAN in the middle of that deployment, said Vice President-Global Security and Technology Policy Chris Boyer. He said there could be security and other benefits to adopting it later. A carrier starting from scratch in a greenfield environment, like Dish Network, might be more able to adopt ORAN, because it wouldn’t have to deal with integrating into a brownfield network, he said.