FCC to Consider 'Inventory' Sale After Auction Authority Restored: Rosenworcel

The FCC remains focused on the lower 3 GHz band for commercial use and will consider an auction of spectrum remaining, or returned, from past auctions when its auction authority is restored, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The U.S. must lead the world on 5G, which is critical to the U.S. economy and to export democratic values “to the rest of the world,” she said. Rosenworcel spoke with Clete Johnson, CSIS senior fellow.

After Congress restores FCC authority to hold auctions, which expired in March, the FCC needs to consider “what kind of inventory auction we can hold, because we’ve got a lot of licenses in a lot of different bands, that are at the FCC,” Rosenworcel said: “We might be able to throw them all together and produce an auction sooner rather than later. … It would allow a lot of carriers to round out their holdings.”

CSIS has raised questions about current U.S. spectrum policy. “Unfortunately, the United States is not competitive in how it has allocated the spectrum needed for 5G,” CSIS said in a June report (see 2306080042).

The U.S. remains “behind other countries, when it comes to how we think about spectrum, how we think about 5G,” said James Lewis, CSIS senior vice president, at the opening of the session. “5G is the core of economic growth in the future,” he said. “5G is not just telephones,” Johnson said. It will “produce and collect more data than has ever existed in history,” he said: “Authoritarian regimes like China are well aware of this. They have a very different approach to data and what it can be used for.”

The U.S. is focused on making mid-band available for 5G, Rosenworcel assured Johnson. “You don’t have to be an engineer to understand this, but mid-band spectrum is the sweet spot for 5G deployment because it has a mix of propagation and capacity and it’s where we think we’re going to be able to develop all of the services that are beyond the phone,” she said.

The U.S. was “a little slow” to understand the importance of mid-band but is catching up under President Joe Biden, Rosenworcel said. “If we do this right, the least interesting thing will be our phones, because we’ll bring wireless functionality into the world at large -- we’ll put sensors in so much around us,” she said.

WRC Concerns

“We are challenged in the U.S. because we are having a harder time identifying how to repurpose mid-band spectrum for new commercial use, and that’s not the case in other countries,” Rosenworcel said. The upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference will be “more challenging than ones that came before,” she said: “I’d like us to enter it from a position of strength.”

Rosenworcel noted the importance of the 3.1 GHz band, being studied by the government for 6G. China also has proposals for the band to be considered at the WRC later this year, she said. “I’m hoping that we’ll be able to have some frank discussions about what we can do ahead of the conference,” she said.

The U.S. is also leading the world in clamping down on untrusted telecom gear embedded in networks, Rosenworcel said. “We have sent a signal to the world -- we don’t trust this equipment, and you shouldn’t either,” she said. “There are definitely other countries that have heard us loud and clear,” she said.

Congress appropriated more than $50 billion to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry through the Chips and Science Act, signed into law in August (see 2208090062), said Diane Rinaldo, executive director of the Open Radio Access Network Policy Coalition, who spoke on a panel after the chairwoman. “It’s time for wireless to have our Chips moment -- it’s time to coalesce policymakers around how important it us that we remain dominant,” said Rinaldo, former NTIA acting administrator.

“We need to change the vernacular of what sharing is,” said John Hunter, T-Mobile assistant vice president-federal regulatory affairs. The federal study looking at 3.1 GHz is focused on coexistence and sharing on the same channel, he said. “How do you do that dynamically?” A lot of the sharing technology that’s being discussed is “years away,” he said. “If sharing isn’t going to work … then we have to look into perhaps partitioning the band,” reserving the majority for DOD while setting part aside for commercial use, he said.

Some military systems operate at very high power levels and “it’s very difficult to find a sharing technology that would allow” dynamic sharing “to work,” Hunter said. “You need to start looking at other ways of sharing,” he said.

Availability of spectrum and harmonization of bands are both critical, said Chris Boyer, AT&T vice president-global security and technology policy. If we don’t have harmonized bands coming out of the WRC “vendors are going to be put in the position of do they build products for the U.S., do they build products for Europe, do they build different products for Asia, and how does that really work and can they achieve the kind of scale that’s necessary,” he said.

The wireless industry needs to work closely with DOD, said Patrick Welsh, Verizon vice president-federal regulatory affairs. “We collaborated very closely” with DOD on AWS, the citizens broadband radio service band and now on the lower 3.1 GHz band, he said. “It’s really those kinds of partnerships, where we’re all sitting at the table, and we can have honest, frank discussions, where we realize that there’s a lot of commonality involved,” Welsh said. There’s already “an existing framework” to work with the government through the Commercial Spectrum Enhancement Act, which has worked well in the past, he said.