CBRS and TV White Spaces Show Limits of FCC Spectrum Experiments: Hazlett
U.S. spectrum policy is getting better, but there’s still room for improvement, Clemson University professor Thomas Hazlett said Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Hazlett was particularly critical of the FCC’s approach to sharing spectrum in the citizens broadband radio service band, which remains a source of contention between carriers and advocates of unlicensed spectrum (see 2512160063).
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There “remain long lags” in making spectrum available for new uses, Hazlett said. Regulation doesn’t allow the market “to expand at the rate of science.”
Carolyn Brandon, a senior industry and innovation fellow at the Georgetown center, said policymakers want spectrum policy that’s rational, predictable and transparent. Congress approved an 800 MHz midband pipeline as part of the reconciliation bill, but “as we all know, that is just the beginning of the long road ahead.”
Hazlett, also the FCC’s former chief economist, acknowledged that spectrum allocation policy has seen “substantial liberalization” in recent years, “and that continues.” A lot of the success of tech and telecom is tied to improved spectrum policies, he said. “We’re headed in the right direction,” but there’s still “substantial command and control” in the system, which often isn’t recognized.
The market should decide how spectrum is used, Hazlett said, noting that companies have better information available to them than any regulator has. After regulators make decisions on how a band will be used, “circumstances will change and new opportunities will arise.” Regulators “cannot future-proof the technologies, and they shouldn’t try.”
Hazlett called CBRS, an FCC focus since 2012, “an incomplete success.” The band shows the problems with mandating how coordination will work, he said. It has “restrictions built in, including power limits and fragmented ownership rights,” which have limited how it can be used. CBRS has become a subject of continuing political fights, he said, adding that one sign of underperformance is that CBRS spectrum isn’t included in the FCC’s spectrum screen.
Other FCC experiments have been worse than CBRS, Hazlett said. Unlicensed use of the TV white spaces, the topic of a 2008 order, has been “a dramatic flop and at best a distraction for regulators.” The proceeding blocked the FCC from potentially making spectrum available for broader use, he said. It makes little sense that 210 MHz of spectrum is “stuck, allocated to 35 old-fashioned” TV channels, with no rights for broadcasters to use the band in other ways. “We’ve got a long way to go to get past some of these experiments.”
However, Hazlett said he sees the initial C-band auction as a success, with the FCC reallocating spectrum and completing an auction with the “lightning speed” of less than four years. The impetus “came from the industry,” with satellite operators “looking for a way to kind of cash out” and sell their access to radio waves to companies “that had higher valued use in mind.” There were “glitches and bumps,” but the FCC did a good job making the band available for 5G, he said.