Fixed wireless coalition takes on Facebook, Google and more over 6 GHz sharing proposal

The Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC) says a study backed by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and others is badly flawed and should not be relied upon to allow for an array of unlicensed devices in the 6 GHz band. Earlier in 2018, representatives from Apple, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Facebook, Google, Intel, MediaTek, Microsoft and Qualcomm met with Federal Communications Commission representatives where they presented a study, prepared by RKF Engineering Solutions, that analyzed sharing between unlicensed operations in the 6 GHz band and existing services.

The upshot: The study showed that unlicensed services can successfully coexist with the primary services present in the 6 GHz band. And that’s about where the FWCC says it went off the rails. The FWCC’s analysis showed that the uncontrolled distribution of unlicensed devices—in the numbers and at the power levels RKF studied—would indeed cause widespread harmful interference to fixed microwave receivers.“If our results are correct, it follows that RKF’s analysis went badly off the rails,” the coalition said in its March 13 filing.  “Unfortunately, RKF’s report is convoluted and hard to read in ways that make its assumptions and methods impossible to reverse-engineer.”