Gomez Still Has 'Strong Concerns' About FCC Proposal to Allow Prison Jamming
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said Monday that she remains concerned about the agency's proposal to allow prison officials to jam cell signals in an effort to curb the use of contraband phones (see 2601130057). Meanwhile, Arpan Sura, a top aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, called for policymakers to adopt a new view of spectrum, with a focus on abundance instead of scarcity. Both spoke Monday at the Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder, Colorado.
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Other conference sessions discussed the AI bubble, the future of independent agencies like the FCC and the use of BEAD non-deployment funds (see 2602020023 and 2602020034).
The record shows there’s “a lot of concern” about the potential for jammers to interfere with communications outside correctional facilities, Gomez said. Prisons and jails are often “in very urban environments -- they’re not remote.” The possibility of interference with public safety communications, 911 calls and “everyday uses of devices is a problem,” she said. “We’ll see how this record develops, but I have strong concerns.”
Jamming is also a bigger issue, Gomez argued, with some criminals using the technology to interfere with security systems, cameras and cellphones to facilitate burglaries of homes and stores. The FCC has prohibited jamming since its inception, and several states have passed laws specifically prohibiting the practice, she noted. There are a growing number of inexpensive, highly programmable devices, supported by an ecosystem of firmware, to make jamming easier for bad actors and “exploit vulnerabilities in wireless technologies.”
Gomez said she worries that the FCC’s jamming proceeding is also “opening the door to more proliferation of … devices that will be used for nefarious purposes.”
She also indicated that she has questions about the FCC's ability to oversee interference, given cuts to its 13 field offices. The agency has cut staffing “quite substantially” in response to a reduction in its budget, Gomez said. “We are not able to respond, particularly locally, where we’ve had to close those offices.”
Challenging the Spectrum Mindset
Sura said the FCC's spectrum focus should be “not to manage scarcity” but to allow innovation and “decentralized experimentation.” He indicated that Carr plans to continue to push to get more spectrum in play where it’s most needed.
“Abundance thinking” requires “challenging reservations and allocations that were made decades ago,” Sura said. He asked why federal agencies, or “spectrum speculators,” should be allowed to “squat” on hundreds of megahertz of lightly used spectrum.
The space economy shows that abundance “can emerge even within systems that were designed for scarcity,” Sura argued. Other regulators, including the EU, “have clung to scarcity mindsets,” and such assumptions “tend to be self-fulfilling.” The cost of not acting is too often invisible, he added. “We don’t see the innovations that weren’t pursued,” the infrastructure that doesn’t get built and the competition that never emerges.
Historically, the FCC has focused on regulating monopoly networks, Sura said. The “entire apparatus” of utility regulation, “from rate of return oversight” to common carrier regulation, “was built on accepting monopoly as the inevitable and focusing on constraint rather than abundance.”
Sura warned that the history of telecom regulation continues to shape the present, even as the industry has changed in fundamental ways. For example, the case for net neutrality rules was based on an old view of regulation, he said, but those rules viewed internet access as a “bottleneck … controlled by a small number of last-mile providers.”
In a separate panel discussion Monday, Rob Alderfer, vice president of technology policy at Charter Communications, predicted that one of the big spectrum trends this year will be the continued deployment of Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz band. That’s important because it’s "seeding" the next generation of broadband and mobile connectivity, he said.
Alderfer also predicted much more discussion about sharing in the bands identified by Congress in the spectrum reallocation bill for possible mobile broadband based on “the realities of those bands.” Just one of the bands being studied, 2.7-2.9 GHz, contains more than 1,800 federal frequency assignments, and in the 4.4-4.9 GHz band, there are more than 5,000, he said. “It’s hard to imagine” sharing won’t be part of the plan for both.
Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, said he would love to see 4.4-4.9 GHz assigned to carriers for wireless use, while 2.7-2.9 GHz could be given over “for something else that’s giving us something new.” Unlicensed is also evolving, he noted. Wi-Fi 8 will make the technology more “deterministic” so users can prioritize applications, making Wi-Fi more like 5G, he said.
Monisha Ghosh, a professor of electrical sharing at the University of Notre Dame, said that despite arguments that spectrum is “the lifeblood” of the wireless industry, "we still don’t do enough" to measure use, and Ookla studies aren’t sufficient. Policymakers need to look at coverage: “Where is the spectrum actually being deployed and … used?” she asked. Policymakers also need better models for interference and propagation, she said.