4.9 GHz Band Should Be Added to FirstNet Spectrum, IWCE Hears
The FCC should reject proposals to reallocate the 4.9 GHz band, long dedicated to public safety use, recommended former FirstNet Chair Sue Swenson in a keynote speech at the virtual IWCE Wednesday. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is considering another look at the band (see 2005040061), the subject of a 2018 Further NPRM. Swenson is the founder of the recently formed Public Safety Spectrum Alliance, which is pushing to keep the band in public safety’s hands (see 2008170023).
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“The FCC seems to believe that the 50 MHz of spectrum is currently underutilized by public safety and I can understand that,” Swenson said. But the FCC didn’t initially collect data on the band's users, she said. “It’s literally impossible to determine true usage of the spectrum,” she said.
Because the number of devices used “has yet to be accurately determined, it seems very premature to make a determination on what should happen to the spectrum at this time,” Swenson said. “Giving up this spectrum today could result public safety once again falling behind in technological capability.” Public safety data usage is increasing and agencies are “thinking of more and more ways” to use broadband, she said: “There’s a lot of work that has to be done to take a look at what the needs are in the future. ... Now is not the time to make a decision that jeopardizes public safety’s future just as technology is advancing to the next generation with 5G.”
“The PSSA simply wants to raise awareness at the FCC, Congress and the White House” about public safety’s need for broadband, Swenson said. PSSA advocates allocating the band to FirstNet, she noted: The FirstNet Authority would then be required to develop a spectrum plan for the band.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks forever changed how public safety views communications, said Charles Dowd, former assistant chief of the New York Police Department. If you asked public safety agencies about communications the day before “they would have politely said to you ‘nah, we’re OK, we’re fine,’” he said: “We had a decidedly different attitude on Sept. 12.” The history of public safety “is absolutely littered with examples of being reactive to a crisis as opposed to being proactive,” Dowd said.
“The logical place” for 4.9 GHz “is inside FirstNet,” said Dowd, also a former FirstNet board member. “Its use needs to continue to be driven by state and local public safety,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic is slowing the deployment of 5G, at least in some areas, 5G Americas President Chris Pearson told IWCE. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of connectivity. The need to work remotely “just makes 5G that much more important.” In the U.S., 5G deployments by the national carriers “are very robust, and they’ve made a great deal of progress and it does not look like so far COVID-19 has slowed anything down,” he said. Latin America has trials and deployments “but the macroeconomics is becoming difficult,” he said: “That could slow deployments.” That's probably true of other developing regions, but not because of the technology itself, he said.
The group welcomes FirstNet’s investment in a 5G core for its network, Pearson said: “All that news about FirstNet, and about what AT&T is doing, is all good news … but also moving toward the right direction.”