FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on 5G and the Need for More Spectrum

Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission said that the wireless industry needs more spectrum and that the government should be willing to chip in to help. A huge swath of airwaves are reserved for various federal departments, ranging from defense to firefighting, that could be better utilized either by being shared with private industry or given over entirely for commercial use. “We doled out those airwaves to the government authorities when spectrum wasn’t quite so scarce,” Commissioner Rosenworcel said, noting that there is growing bipartisan interest in studying how to reallocate this spectrum.

Commissioner Rosenworcel has also been outspoken on the need for the United States to move more quickly on next-generation cellular networks, known as 5G. She is a proponent of allocating certain higher-frequency bands of spectrum for this coming generation of wireless devices and combining it with “small-cell technology,” which uses small radio towers to boost a network’s capacity in urban areas where the demand is greatest. “In the next few weeks at the FCC we are going to vote on the rule-making that identifies some of those high bands of spectrum and to figure out how to push forward on 5G,” Rosenworcel said.