NTIA on Right Track with Release of 5 GHz Report, Cisco Official Says
Cisco views last week’s NTIA report on the 5 GHz band as mostly a positive development for industry, hungry for more bandwidth for Wi-Fi, said Mary Brown, director-government affairs, in an interview Wednesday. Cisco also released a report by Plum Consulting, which predicts Europe could reap more than €16.3 billion ($22.1 billion) in future economic benefit if 5 GHz spectrum there is made available for Wi-Fi. The FCC announced Wednesday the 5 GHz notice of proposed rulemaking on Wi-Fi in the band is tentatively on the agenda for the commission’s Feb. 20 meeting. The only other item is a cell signal booster report and order.
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Brown said the report (CD Jan 28 p5) was largely what Cisco expected. “The NTIA report, the FCC announcement on the NPRM, this is all based on deadlines that Congress set in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act,” she said. “The task that was given to NTIA was in fact the task that they accomplished, which is to say, ‘You guys go out and figure out what’s in these expansion bands in 5 GHz, and tell us something about risks to federal systems if we let unlicensed in.'”
The important thing NTIA provided in the report was “an inventory of what the interference environment was going to be like and, therefore, our first window into what are the technology challenges that we'll have to face if we move into these expansion bands,” Brown said. “It provided a lot of information for us begin to digest. If we want to move into these expansion bands, what are we going to have to do? What is our equipment going to have to be able to do? We thought it really moved the ball down the field.” The report provides a good starting point for what’s expected to be a “very open-ended” NPRM from the FCC with relatively few tentative conclusions, Brown said. “We're teed up now to have the kinds of in depth technical conversations that need to happen."
The Plum report, paid for by Cisco, noted the growing importance of Wi-Fi for the information and communications technology industry worldwide (http://bit.ly/14ue0Ei). “Wi-Fi has become a key part of the ICT ecosystem playing a role in mobile offload, public access and in-premise access,” the report said. “Wi-Fi is also expected to play an expanding role in terms of device-to-device connectivity, for example, streaming content from a smart device to a large screen. Wi-Fi connectivity already accounts for more traffic than the wired Internet and far more than the mobile Internet."
Meanwhile, PCIA President Jonathan Adelstein, a former FCC commissioner, spoke about the growing importance of Wi-Fi, at a Wi-Fi Summit in Miami. Adelstein said the U.S. faces a “wireless data crunch” rather than a spectrum crunch. “We need all hands on deck -- and all technologies available -- to meet the crushing demand,” he said (http://xrl.us/bodpmh). “Every provider of voice, data, video, social networking applications, mobile payment solutions, public safety and security -- and industries not yet imagined -- requires our industry to work as smart, efficiently, and creatively to meet the data tsunami.”