Incumbents Raise Concerns on Further Changes to 6 GHz Rules
Groups representing incumbent licensees in the 6 GHz band, led by electric utilities, asked the FCC to seek comment on any revised rules for the band, “consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act,” before issuing an order as expected later this…
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year (see 2308070060). “The Commission may not adopt rules which were not proposed” in the 2020 Further NPRM “or otherwise considered in this proceeding,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 18-295: “Actual notice of any new rules must come from the Commission and not from monitoring comments in the record. Although the Commission may adopt rules that are the logical outgrowth of those that were proposed, it must provide fair and sufficient notice, including about the material components of such a rule.” The opportunity for comment is “particularly vital where, as here, the matter involves complex technical issues and a modification of the proposed rule results in a substantial change affecting the technical issues under consideration,” the groups said. The filing was signed by the Utilities Technology Council, the Edison Electric Institute, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, APCO and the Enterprise Wireless Alliance. AT&T also weighed in, raising concerns about very-low-power operations in the band, a focus of the FNPRM. Advocates “continue to assert as gospel various technical theories that are subject to considerable debate on the record, to urge the Commission to rely on their self-interested, curated summaries of simulations that remain unfiled and undocumented, and to extrapolate insignificant results to broad assertions of interference protection,” AT&T said: “In the face of substantial real-world testing demonstrating the potential for interference, the Commission should not rely on unfiled, untested, and undocumented assertions for decisions that could impact critical radio communications infrastructure.”