Spectrum

What kind of spectrum is AT&T looking to as it plots it 5G strategies? “All of it,’’ according to Hank Hultquist, AT&T’s vice president of federal regulatory. And AT&T isn’t alone in taking a holistic view of the role spectrum will play as carriers roll out 5G services and technologies in the coming years.

Indeed, that was the overriding theme during a round table discussion Sept 13 at Mobile World Congress Americas focusing on airwaves and next-generation networks. 5G “is not a particular band; it’s more a weaving together,” said Julie Knapp, chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology. Rather, it will see carriers use a wide variety of wavelengths as they build next-generation networks, using the most appropriate spectrum and antennas in specific areas based on multiple factors.

Federal Communications Commission officials conducted a webinar explaining how proposed Connect America Fund (CAF) II auction rules would work. The auction will award funding to help cover the cost of deploying broadband in unserved rural areas. It is expected to take place in 2018, officials said. The rules discussed were proposed in a public notice adopted in Aug. Interested parties have until September 17 to comment on the public notice, with reply comments due October 17.

The CAF II auction is a reverse auction, meaning that funding, in general, is designed to go to the service provider that offers to provide service at the lowest level of support (with some caveats). The maximum amount of support that any service provider will receive in the CAF II auction, also known as the “reserve price,” is the amount of support that was previously rejected by the incumbent price cap carrier. Collectively, the price cap carriers accepted the majority of funding offered, but up to nearly $2 billion (up to $200 million annually for 10 years) remains to be awarded for parts of 20 states. The FCC previously established weighting factors for the auction, designed to incentivize service providers to deliver higher-speed service with low latency.

Since becoming Chairman, I have consistently emphasized the need for the Commission’s regulations to match realities of the current marketplace. Our rules must reflect today’s technological and economic conditions, not those of yesterday. And at this month’s open meeting, we will advance this objective by focusing on whether to update or scrap outdated rules. That’s why we’re dubbing September .

The House Communications Subcommittee drilled into the Federal Communications Commission's post-incentive auction repack plan in a hearing that touched on everything from hurricanes and tornados to tall towers, timelines and even the Sinclair/Tribune merger, which actually drew a fair share of time and attention. Most of the ground covered was not new, but there were some key takeaways, which were that both keeping broadcasters on air and serving viewers and freeing up spectrum for deploying and advancing broadband service are important, that how much money and time that will take remain points of debate, and that Congress will likely have to step in, at least on the financial end. Some legislators emphasized the need to hold broadcasters harmless, while others countered that they should not be allowed to do any foot-dragging, noting that wireless carriers had bid $20 billion for the spectrum.

By most accounts, the U.S. broadcast incentive auction was a success. Does that mean it was perfect? No. This was a very complex undertaking. Were lessons learned? Absolutely, and I will discuss that a bit later. But all things considered, the mechanisms designed and put in place worked relatively well. Through the incentive auction, the U.S., on a completely voluntary basis, reallocated broadcast spectrum to mobile use, which will now be used by private commercial providers to offer 4G and 5G broadband networks. In fact, one U.S. winning bidder has already announced that it will initiate 5G in 600 MHz and has already turned on its first 600 MHz LTE system.

Federal agencies, especially the Department of Defense (DoD), don’t face normal marketplace pressures to economize their use of spectrum. While the potential societal gains of reallocating federal spectrum for commercial use are likely in the hundreds of billions of dollars, attempts at addressing this problem have met many roadblocks. Today, I’m offering another idea for consideration: the option of allowing agencies to free up some of their spectrum holdings in exchange for budgetary relief. While I still believe the imposition of Agency Spectrum Fees is the best course of action, this new proposal represents a compromise between differing carrot and stick approaches. And it is particularly timely today, as many of these federal agencies face increasing budgetary pressure. I suggest that federal agencies be permitted to use their spectrum holdings to offset the annual budgetary caps and sub caps. This would mean that, in achieving its respective budget limits, a federal agency could substitute the market value – as determined by an average of Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget estimates – of their surrendered spectrum to offset other cuts or even expand its spending options. It amounts to a spectrum-for-cash swap.

Public policy has probably never been more important for the US wireless industry as it will be over the next several years. And the schedule for Mobile World Congress Americas underscores that. Legislative and regulatory issues will play a major role at the trade show, starting with the first keynote Sept 12 featuring Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and CTIA CEO Margaret Attwell Baker. Other discussions include a panel analyzing the FCC’s incentive auction of 600 MHz spectrum, a look at unmanned aerial services hosted by CTIA Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Jackie McCarthy and a round table examining how the coming transition to 5G is spurring new efforts to streamline siting processes. And that’s just day one.

On August 4, 2017, the Commission released the Connect America Fund Phase II (CAF II) Auction Comment Public Notice, seeking comment on detailed proposals for conducting the Phase II reverse auction designated as Auction 903. While many of the pre-auction and bidding procedures and processes proposed for this auction are similar to those used in other Commission auctions, the proposals include some new procedures and processes. To facilitate public input on the proposals, the Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force announces that the Wireless Telecommunications and Wireline Competition Bureaus will host a webinar about the proposed auction process on September 11, 2017, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET.

The House Commerce Committee has switched gears and will hold a Sept. 7 hearing on the post-incentive auction repack in its Communications Subcommittee. The committee had planned to hold a high-profile hearing on network neutrality on that date, but sources say that has been indefinitely postponed. Now, the Communications subcommittee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. titled “The Broadcast Incentive Auction: Update on Repacking Opportunities and Challenges.” No witnesses had been set at press time. The repack will be getting in gear this fall, with almost a thousand TV stations having to move to make room for wireless operators in the swaths of broadcast spectrum purchased in the spectrum auction.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit remanded the SNR Wireless v. Federal Communications Commission case to the FCC. Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge Harold Feld said, “We’re extremely pleased that the D.C. Circuit agreed with our analysis that although the FCC had the authority to deny the small business credit, the agency should have given DISH Network, SNR Wireless and Northstar a chance to remedy the problem. As we noted in our amicus brief, the small business credit put licenses in the hands of new competitors and constituted the single largest win of FCC licenses by minority-owned businesses like SNR Wireless and Northstar."