Federated CEO refutes those CBRS slams

In 2022, a study commissioned by CTIA basically called Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) a failure, in part due to its low power levels and limited use cases. Some saw it as a smear campaign against CBRS because CTIA would prefer the 3.1-3.45 GHz band to be licensed rather than end up looking more like CBRS, which involves a three-tiered sharing system to protect Department of Defense (DoD) incumbents. Federated Wireless at that time defended CBRS and its role as an Innovation Band. But what does Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi say of those criticisms? Federated Wireless is a Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrator and built a coast-to-coast Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) network that is designed to protect incumbent DoD users while allowing commercial operations to use the 3.5 GHz spectrum. “I personally think CBRS is one of the cleanest and most interference-free spectrum [bands] out there because of all the automation and because of all the data we collect,” he said. “It’s almost astonishing, but we’re close to almost 400,000 radios on this system now. We get less than maybe 20 interference investigation requests a year and we handle all of them.” The best proof points for CBRS are all the DoD deployments that are using General Authorized Access (GAA), the unlicensed portion of the CBRS band, and it works for them, he said. “If we can optimize GAA for a DoD deployment that’s very demanding, you know we can do it.”