C-Band Fight Shows Need for Early White House Involvement, Experts Say
The last-minute fight over the C band, and the scramble for a compromise that allowed Verizon and AT&T to start turning on operations last year, while providing extra protection for radio altimeters around some airports (see 2201180065), shows the need to head off problems before they become a crisis, experts said Monday at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event.
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The C-band fight was “a real embarrassment” for the U.S., said Robert Puentes, president of the Eno Center for Transportation. A year ago, the FCC, FAA and industry agreed at the “11th hour” to a modified rollout, Puentes said: “While the crisis was temporarily averted it was clear that we really did need to figure out” an improved process for allocating spectrum “and to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Puentes said.
The way the C band was handled was “suboptimal,” conceded Scott Harris, NTIA director-national spectrum strategy. The “good news” is that after having “arguably fallen into the abyss, literally no one wants to do this again,” he said: “It was a teaching experience for everybody involved.”
No one is completely happy with how the C-band deployment rolled out, but “we are certainly in a better place than we expected to be at this time last year,” Harris said. Through testing, study, exchange of data and follow-up discussions, spectrum problems “can in fact be resolved -- they need not be a zero-sum game,” he said. Federal agencies realized better coordination is needed going forward, he said. Harris, who noted he started in the wireless industry in 1994, said the “working relationship” between the FCC and NTIA has never been better than now.
The C-band/radio altimeter issue is an example of a matter that needs to be “coordinated at the White House level” to make sure the U.S. government takes a position that balances all the interests involved, said Larry Strickling, NTIA administrator in the Obama administration. “That’s what didn’t happen in this particular case,” he said. NTIA could then present a unified administration position to the FCC, he said.
There have been similar spectrum fights in recent years when, because of the lack of high-level oversight, federal agencies brought their concerns directly to the FCC, rather than working through NTIA, Strickling said: That’s “a recipe for confusion, if not disaster, because the United States government really ought to be speaking with one voice.”
Radio altimeters are most important when pilots don’t have good visibility -- when they have to break through clouds to see the runway from a few hundred feet off the ground, said Jennifer Holder, Boeing director-aviation safety and regulatory affairs. “Loss of situational awareness … is one of the leading causes of accidents,” she said.
Holder said she’s not a spectrum expert and didn’t initially realize the potential risk from out-of-band emissions. “When our radio altimeters are listening to something that is not the radio altimeter signal, that’s not a good thing,” she said. “We don’t want to have what happened for 5G happen again,” she said. “It does feel like over the years we’ve had to play defense,” she said. The tight timelines in FCC proceedings make it difficult to develop comments on complicated issues like air safety, she said.
The aviation industry needs to be able to “anticipate” future spectrum needs of the wireless industry as it moves to 6G and beyond, Holder said. “I’m not sure that we’re in a position to do that,” she said: “We’ve had a whole bunch of retirements over the last two to three years.” Aviation is also a big industry and doesn’t always speak with one voice, she said.
“The good news” is that the wireless industry now has a better “working relationship” with the aviation industry, said Tom Power, CTIA general counsel. Power, former deputy federal chief technology officer under Obama, agreed with Strickling that the White House has a role to play. “I felt like my role in the White House was to convene folks,” he said. “The question for the aviation industry is: are altimeters 'eavesdropping' on our spectrum,” he said: “That’s just a gray area.”
The replacement cycle for aircraft is much longer than for mobile devices, Power noted. “Apple has probably come up with two new iPhones since we’ve been here this morning,” he joked: Some altimeters “were just poorly designed, but the design was decades ago.”
Boeing uses seven different radio altimeters on its aircraft -- some can be upgraded and some have to be swapped out, and changes must be certified by regulators, Holder said. “When we look at just the grand scale of all this” the current July deadline (see 2211160075) for airlines to retrofit all aircraft is “concerning for everyone,” she said: “We’re working as fast we can.”
“I was going to give a slightly more optimistic view, but now I can’t,” Power said.