The Showdown Over Airlines and 5G Is Part of a Much Bigger Problem

Far faster mobile broadband speeds and new services on your 5G-enabled smartphone or a greater risk that your next flight crashes on landing? This should be a false choice in tech-savvy America. Yet, according to the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration, it is an unresolved risk. The primary problem has been a steady breakdown in coordination and cooperation between the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates business use of increasingly crowded public airwaves, and the other federal agencies that rely on wireless frequencies or regulate a multitude of industries, like the airlines. Unlike the Obama administration, which coordinated spectrum policy from the White House, the Trump administration had an ad hoc spectrum policy that failed to articulate a coherent set of national priorities that would supersede the natural NIMBY reflex of spectrum incumbents. The FAA fiasco is just the latest in a series of standoffs over the past four years between the FCC and federal agencies defending the spectrum status quo.

So what is to be done? First, the Biden White House needs to send a clear message that the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration is in charge of coordinating federal agency spectrum policy, just as Congress intended. Second, the NTIA and FCC need to collaborate on an updated national spectrum policy and coordination process. Third, the NTIA and any affected federal agencies need to participate actively in FCC rulemakings from beginning to end. They need to put up or shut up concerning interference concerns—and submit technical studies and data, just as private industry does. Fourth, the NTIA and the Department of Defense—by far the largest federal spectrum user—need to follow through rapidly on proposals to create an automated database to more efficiently coordinate spectrum sharing among agencies and with the private sector. Finally, the White House needs to be what FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr recently called “the adult in the room.”

[Michael Calabrese directs the Wireless Future Project at New America’s Open Technology Institute]