Officials Increasingly Open to Sharing Spectrum with Administration Strategy Coming

Deputy Commerce Secretary Karen Dunn Kelley said the U.S. must lead the world on 5G, not at the expense of federal agencies. “We must protect the spectrum resources used by the government,” Kelley said. The U.S. government is “the most sophisticated consumer of spectrum in the world,” she said: “Our armed forces, law enforcement agencies, scientists and engineers all rely on spectrum.”

The White House will release its long-awaited national spectrum strategy this fall (see 1907310033), Kelley said. “This strategy will clarify our long-term approach that incorporates planning, innovation, and collaboration. … We need to dedicate enough spectrum to meet the growing demands of 5G,” she said. The U.S. has allocated 5.9 GHz of licensed spectrum exclusively for 5G, she said: “This is more than any other country on earth, and we're not finished. There is an additional 7 GHz of spectrum under study right now.”

Kelley also said space is a top administration focus. “We must ensure that the U.S. is the flag of choice for space commerce,” she said. “NTIA must work with federal partners to provide the satellite industry with sufficient access to radio frequency spectrum. We want to increase not just the number of satellites in space but the variety of functions that they will perform.”

Fred Williams, DOD director-spectrum policy and programs, said the world is changing and the military must, too. “We've had a perspective change,” he said. When industry worked with agencies to clear the AWS-1 band, many were “very defensive,” he said: “That’s changed. … We’re learning a lot.” The Pentagon's job in repurposing isn’t to “say no, but to do due diligence,” Williams said.

“Spectrum has become congested,” Williams said. “We're learning new ways to play through that.” His department sees potential in dynamic sharing, highlighted by the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band, he said. “We are pushing the envelope on having software-defined radios de-conflict themselves in congested space,” he said. “We see those lines of effort continuing.” But, he said, "we are taking way too long to get to the speed of decision.” Williams said DOD is "partnering with industry,” he said: “We're partnering with NTIA in national test centers. We are going to create test beds and allow industry to come in and partner with DOD to exploit our infrastructure.”

Safety is FAA's top concern, said Ian Atkins, director-spectrum strategy and policy. “You worry about your luggage,” he said: “You shouldn't worry what spectrum is used to get your aircraft from A to B.” Safety “leads us to be naturally protective and not a collaborative type of agency when it comes to spectrum,” he said. Atkins said the aviation industry is learning to do more with less: “Our spectrum needs will actually go down. And we're able to do that because a lot of our systems are somewhat older. For example, we can take a single analog channel and get so much more utility out of it.”

The developing approach to commercial use of drones could provide a map for the future, Atkins said. “When somebody wants to fly a drone over Washington, they plug the drone into the network and apply where they want to apply, the channels are downloaded to the drone automatically, it flies, it completes its mission and when it completes the mission, the channels go back in the bank for somebody else to use,” he said. FAA doesn’t have to manage the system at all, he said.

DOT Concerns

Not all bands can be safely shared, said Karen Van Dyke, Department of Transportation director-spectrum management. DOT believes the 5.9 GHz band must be preserved for safety, including dedicated short-range communications. Businesses need “confidence in the system … to make long-term investments in innovative technologies,” she said. “We are concerned about that spectrum potentially being repurposed.” After considerable investment, “the automobile industry is ready to equip and move forward,” she said.

On an industry panel, Dean Brenner, Qualcomm senior vice president-spectrum strategy and technology policy, backed reallocation of the 5.9 GHz band. “If cellular vehicle-to-everything wasn't a lot better, we wouldn't have invented it,” he said: “If DSRC was the best there was, there would be no reason for anyone to invent anything new. In fact, it's not.”

The U.S. doesn’t have enough unlicensed spectrum today to support Wi-Fi 6 and a new generation of service, said Chris Szymanski, Broadcom director-government affairs, a leading advocate of sharing in the 6 GHz band (see 1909090057). Wi-Fi's “the single most important wireless technology for broadband access today and it's the way that most Americans use and take advantage of their wireline network,” he said. Current bands won’t support the 160 MHz channels available in Wi-Fi 6, he said. The 5.9 and 6 GHz bands “are exactly the right frequencies to focus on, but time is of the essence,” he said.

David Goldman, SpaceX director-satellite policy, said the FCC should be cautious about moving too quickly to allocate bands, before anyone knows how they will be used. When the agency created the DSRC band 20 years ago, “they thought they were doing something brilliant,” Goldman said: “This was a new technology. They were allowing this to flourish. It was a new idea. But technology passed it. Now we have this legacy rule that is preventing new more efficient technology from coming in.”

The key is allocating spectrum for flexible use, responded Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory. An entity holding flexible use rights “has incentives to drive that spectrum to its highest value use,” he said. “That is different from a situation where spectrum is allocated to a specific technology.”

“How flexible are you talking about,” Goldman asked. “Some of the licenses that you think are flexible use I think are unusable, for new, for things that we're working on.”

Industry officials said the 6 GHz band is critical for Wi-Fi, though questions remain. The FCC process “will figure this out,” Hultquist said: “I don't think AT&T is at the point yet where we're comfortable across the board that this use can occur and, critically … two components would have to be in place -- we avoid interference, and if interference occurs, there's a way of identifying the source and mitigating it.”

The FCC doesn’t allocate spectrum “in the middle of the night when no one notices,” Brenner said: “The proper technical solution will be reached.”