FCC Pushing for International Harmonization Allowing Mobile Broadband Throughout UHF Band

"Under this new allocation arrangement, administrations may continue to allow for existing services, such as broadcasting, or utilize portions of the UHF band for the implementation of new mobile broadband applications,” Nelson said. Congress directly instructed the FCC in last year’s spectrum law to sell part of the band in an incentive auction, he said. “That being said, yes, it is controversial with the television broadcasters,” Nelson said. “The thought is you give the flexibility to the different administrations to potentially use whatever it is that they choose to do.” Nelson said Canada has provided particular “leadership and support” for the U.S. position on the issue, he said.

Nelson conceded that finding more spectrum for mobile broadband “is an immediate challenge for communications companies around the world.” The best options for offering mobile broadband in the U.S. include the UHF TV band, the 3.5 GHz band and the 5 GHz band, he said.

The FCC continues to move forward on a controversial proposal to allow unlicensed use of the 5 GHz band on a secondary basis, Nelson said. Part of the spectrum has been set aside for automotive anti-collision systems and automakers have raised concerns on this reallocation (CD May 31 p1). “This would increase the spectrum available for these devices in the 5 GHz band by approximately 35 percent,” he said. “It would represent a significant increase in the spectrum available for unlicensed devices across the overall radio spectrum.”

The FCC plans to work with NTIA and industry stakeholders on “quantitative analysis” of “potential mitigation requirements” that are needed to protect other spectrum users, Nelson said. He also said the band is being looked at for unlicensed use in Europe and elsewhere.

The FCC opposes any international look at the future use of spectrum above 6 GHz and is recommending to the ITU that “discussion should be held for a future WRC,” Nelson said. Nelson also said countries in the Americas are charting a different course on some spectrum bands. For example, Brazil “has made substantial progress” in rolling out 4G services in the 2.5 GHz band, bundled with 450 MHz spectrum, he said.

"I'm going to bet that pretty much everyone in the room is a smartphone user,” said Charla Rath, wireless policy development vice president at Verizon. “You do remember that seven years ago there weren’t any smartphones and that we do things with these smartphones that we didn’t even anticipate seven years ago.” Regulators and industry need to think about what will happen in the next seven years, she said. “When we look at our projections, we're actually in some ways looking behind us and projecting forward,” she said.

As part of a second panel Thursday, Mark Settle, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology’s Policy and Rules Division, said there will inevitably be more demand placed on unlicensed spectrum, partially as wireless carriers offload traffic onto Wi-Fi.

"The industry has certainly noticed that offloading to unlicensed is one very possible solution,” Settle said. According to a recent report, he said, 40 percent of the smartphones this year support the newest 802.11 standards. “The reason for the spectrum crunch that we're seeing [is] smartphones,” Settle said. “The smartphones places about 24 times the demand on spectrum resources as a conventional type cellphones, tablets 120 times.”

"A few years back folks were talking about three screens, four screens and the cloud, they were talking about having access to your information wherever you are, being always connected, and I think we're beginning to live that existence today,” said Paula Boyd, a government affairs director at Microsoft.

In remarks to the conference Wednesday, John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Bureau, warned that technology and more efficient use of spectrum shouldn’t be viewed as an alternative to making more spectrum available for broadband. “I don’t think it’s really an either/or choice,” he said. “Having more spectrum available actually makes it more possible to have more new technology available, which allows for more efficient use of spectrum,” he said. “The other good thing about more spectrum is it helps facilitate more competition.”

The FCC is “not leaving any stones unturned” in seeking spectrum that can be auctioned, Leibovitz said. “A good example is the upcoming H-block auction,” he said. “The H block was once written off as guard band spectrum. There were interference problems that basically made it unusable for many users.” The spectrum is to be sold in January in the first major spectrum auction since 2008, he noted.

In some cases the FCC has found it more efficient to liberalize the rules for a band so it can be used for another purpose, Leibovitz said. “There are some cases where rights and spectrum have already been assigned to a small number of licensees, administrative repurposing is just not practical given the amount of time it would take and the difficulties it would pose,” he said. “In those kinds of cases we think liberalization makes sense.” He cited Wireless Communications Service spectrum owned by AT&T and AWS-4 spectrum as case studies of how liberalization can work. Spectrum sharing also has a big role to play. “It’s a big buzzword these days, even though spectrum sharing has been around since the dawn of radio,” he said. “It’s really the techniques and the regulatory implementation that are changing.”