U.S. Must Fight To Maintain Leadership Position as 5G Unfolds, CTIA Says
The FCC’s expected order on high-frequency spectrum is critical to 5G and the IoT, said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs, at a luncheon Tuesday sponsored by New America’s Wireless Future Project and Microsoft. The session came the day after a major policy address by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on 5G (see 1606200044).
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“I know many of you are familiar with the experience of 4G,” Bergmann said. “In the U.S. we were able to really leapfrog other countries and show leadership in deployment and adoption of LTE and we’ve been accruing the benefits,” he said. The U.S. has added nearly $300 billion to its gross domestic product due to LTE, he said. “The U.S. has become the hub for the apps economy and we’ve really been playing, I think, sort of on home field advantage for the last five years when it comes to mobile innovation,” he said. “As we look ahead to the next generation of technology we want to make sure that we continue to maintain that leadership.”
There’s a global race to lead in 5G, Bergmann said. “Folks in Europe, folks in Japan, have invested a lot and are working and making their plans to try to be out in front on 5G,” he said. The U.S. needs to stay ahead. All four major wireless carriers have announced 5G tests, he said. “A key component of that is making the spectrum available that 5G will ride on,” Bergmann said. “The high-bands are where 5G is being first deployed and where the standards are first being developed”
“We need to look at this fantastic opportunity for a wide variety of services,” but the FCC needs to recognize that its traditional rules may not work for 5G, said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge. A paradox is that when people talk about 5G they talk about innovation, he said. When we talk about FCC service rules and questions of sharing spectrum “suddenly everybody gets locked back into their sort of traditional approach and traditional business model and says, ‘Well, we can’t be too crazy here, we don’t want to innovate too much or be too experimental,’” he said.
The U.S. had to innovate in the past when new spectrum bands came online, Feld said. When the policymakers first tackled what were then considered radically high microwave bands at 6 GHz in the 1950s and 1960s “we did not do the broadcast, make an artificial circle, area licenses,” he said. “We said we’re going to try something different and we’re going to have a whole different licensing regime.” In the high-frequency bands the FCC is taking on another set of bands where the physics are "very, very different," he said. "We need to take that into account as we think about what does it mean to have an exclusive license. Why would we want it? Is it just for interference? Is it to encourage investment?"
Kurt Schaubach, chief technology officer at Federated Wireless, urged the FCC to adopt a three-tiered sharing model based on the 3.5 GHz band at 37 GHz, one of the bands targeted by the FCC. “We think that framework, which is already starting to prove out, led toward commercial viability in the 3.5 GHz band, could work in the 37 GHz band as well,” he said. Federated provides systems for dynamic sharing, which are to be used in the 3.5 GHz band. The FCC needs to target in-building coverage, Schaubach said. “Today, less than 2 percent of buildings have access to licensed wireless systems,” he said. “Yet 80 percent of all wireless traffic terminates indoors.”