Eighth Floor Working Through Details of 24 GHz NPRM

The history of the high-frequency bands has been mixed, industry officials said. They said the FCC has already licensed some bands above 24 GHz, with long build-out deadlines, but ended up having to take many of the licenses back. FiberTower took the FCC to court challenging a 2012 order canceling 689 wireless spectrum licenses it held in the 24 and 39 GHz bands (see 1410150093). Questions remain about whether to accommodate some commissioner concerns, and if the FCC will expand the number of bands teed up by the NPRM, industry lawyers said.

“The FCC authorized some of these frequencies for fixed operations many years ago, auctioned off hundreds of licenses, and has taken many of them back for failure to construct, causing a lot of controversy in the fixed wireless industry," said Mitchell Lazarus of Fletcher Heald, who represents clients using the high-band spectrum. “Now it’s trying to overlay new services on top of the remaining, existing licenses. I look forward to seeing what they come up with in the item.”

“Today we use 24 GHz microwave spectrum for point-to-point backhaul links, but the 5G networks of tomorrow will use high-band spectrum between 6 and 100 GHz to obtain gigabit speeds for mobile devices,” predicted Richard Bennett, network architect and founder of the High Tech Forum. “The FCC should help ease the deployment of the 5G IoT by freeing up this spectrum, most of which is currently unused, for both licensed and unlicensed uses.”

Frequencies above 6 GHz don’t bend well and are best suited to line-of-site applications, said Roger Entner, analyst at Recon Analytics. “The 5G visionaries foresee such a dense antenna environment that when a consumer turns his or her head and loses line of sight from one antenna thatthere will be another antenna ready to continue the connection,” he said. “For this to become a reality and very high frequencies to become useful, a lot of new network design and deployment issues have to be solved in conjunction with the availability of the necessary spectrum. As regulators are providing spectrum and wireless companies work on the technologies, we are watching the chicken and the egg being created simultaneously.”

There's renewed interest in the high-band spectrum because little low- or mid-band spectrum remains unused, said Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge and member of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. “The general rule in the industry seems to be to keep momentum rolling on designating new spectrum, because once the pipeline dries up no one knows where the next batch is coming from." That works in the short term, but in the end is self-defeating, he said. “My hope is that this NPRM will continue the development of new models of spectrum use that will set us on a path to sustainability,” he said. “If we look at this as simply another batch of spectrum to auction and use in the same way as AWS-1 or AWS-3, then it will be a wasted opportunity.”

In a filing last week in the 24 GHz proceeding, Ericsson said the spectrum can be valuable if the FCC gets the rules right. “Ericsson is interested in working with the Commission to help craft rules which recognize that certain technologies which we expect to see utilized in providing 5G services -- such as beam forming, massive MIMO [multiple-input and multiple-output] arrays, and different subcarrier spacing arrangements -- may require different metrics from those used today,” the company said. CTIA said the high-frequency spectrum could “help complement existing and future mobile broadband services and increase the capacity and capabilities of wireless providers to provide advanced services to the public.” The filings were in docket 14-177.