FCC Prep Group for WAC-15 Unable To Agree on Drones, Spectrum for Mobile Telecom
The FCC World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee (WAC) held its eighth and likely final meeting Wednesday before WRC-15, scheduled to start Nov. 2 in Geneva. WAC members reported continuing disagreements on spectrum for drones and for mobile communications. The WAC, coordinated by the FCC, reflects the position of U.S. industry on issues before the WRC.
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Most of the disagreements aired Wednesday were in Informal Working Group-2 (IWG-2) on Terrestrial Services. In one area of contention, Alcatel-Lucent and Harris Wiltshire had proposed the WAC support a U.S. position seeking an examination of expanding the frequencies that could be used for drones, high-altitude platform stations, at a later WRC, said IWG Chairman Charles Rush, chief technology officer at Telecommunications Management Group.
But Rush said some other members of the group "don’t support the broad frequency range that’s given in View A and they have questions regarding protection criteria in the existing services in the bands … and they want to specifically limit the expansion of the frequency ranges.” DirecTV, EchoStar, Inmarsat, Intelsat and SES Americom were among those who support the alternative proposal, Rush said.
Harris Wiltshire partner Patricia Paoletta said lots of work went into the item from members of the IWG-2 on both sides. “We were trying to get consensus for the FCC,” she said. “There’s a long history of high-altitude platform stations,” most of it done 20 years ago, she said. Subsequent WRCs added three more identifications to the regulations, but none was global and all have limitations, she said. Companies like Google are looking to deploy “a new and improved version” of unmanned aerial vehicles, Paoletta said. “They are looking at deploying light-weight, solar-paneled, unmanned planes to deliver broadband,” she said.
WAC member Christopher Bjornson, of counsel at Steptoe & Johnson, said his client Facebook supports expanding the frequency ranges available to unmanned aerial vehicles. “It is an appropriate proposal for future studies,” he said. “It identifies a finite range of bands that can be studied and refined.”
IWG-2 also was unable to reach a single position on the future use of the 1300-1400 MHz, 2700-2900 MHz and 4400-4990 MHz bands for international mobile telecommunications (IMT), Rush said. “We have two views on each and every one of those,” he said. NTIA had proposed that the WRC approve no changes for the bands, Rush said. “The WAC IWG-2 group, had a divergence of opinion as to whether to support the proposal” by NTIA, he said.
Another area of disagreement was on whether the U.S. should support an agenda item backing future work on IMT and mobile broadband above 6 GHz at WRC-19, Rush said. Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Ericsson, Intel, Motorola Mobility, Samsung, Sprint and Verizon were among the companies supporting the agenda item, he said. View B proponents see the proposal as “too broad, too open-ended frequency wise” and feel it fails to take into account existing services, he said. Echostar, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Iridium, Lockheed Martin, SES Americom and ViaSat were among those espousing the second position, he said. Officials from 21st Century Fox and the American Radio Relay League said they also support this second, more conservative view.
FCC International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre said the WAC had finalized work on 85 items, though some came with multiple views. She compared the WAC’s work to a mini-WRC held just in the U.S. “I know that sometimes we have to split the baby and that’s one of the jobs that we do here at the FCC,” De La Torre said. “We’ve really produced a lot for this particular WRC, but unfortunately we haven’t finished on everything.” She encouraged all WAC members to join the U.S. delegation to WRC-15.