Light Reading

Recent telecommunications conferences have yielded one consistent disconnect – between wireless carriers seeking details about future spectrum allocations and government representatives offering vague assurances of better bandwidth to come. Consider the quizzing of Scott Blake Harris, senior spectrum advisor and director of national spectrum strategy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, at ForumGlobal's 12th Americas Spectrum Management Conference in Washington on October 10.

Just days before Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced plans to reinstate some net neutrality guidelines, the FCC also opened a proceeding into the spectrum screen. The move could reflect the fact that Rosenworcel now believes she has enough political clout to impose limits on 5G spectrum ownership via the agency's spectrum screen. After all, Democratic commissioners now outnumber Republicans after the Senate finally approved Democrat Anna Gomez as the fifth commissioner on the FCC.

Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey believes fixed wireless access (FWA) won't meet speed and bandwidth demands. In fact, Winfrey likens it to DSL – a product that had its moment but saw many customers flee to cable's higher-quality connections. The initial success of FWA "shows there's a nice, niche market for limited-bandwidth, limited-capacity, and limited-reliability product," Winfrey said.

T-Mobile won thousands of 2.5GHz spectrum licenses around the US in a Federal Communications Commission auction that ended in 2022. But the FCC would face "criminal penalties" if it gave T-Mobile its 2.5GHz license winnings. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained that the FCC's "auction authority" expired in March and so far has not been renewed by Congress, which means the agency no longer has the regulatory authority to issue spectrum licenses.

The clock is ticking for state broadband offices to submit their initial proposals to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) describing how each state will carry out its competitive Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant process. The vast majority of states are still drafting their proposals and seeking stakeholder input, but that input works both ways.

The CTIA is among wireless industry stakeholders cautioning the Federal Communications Commission against complicating the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system with additions of multimedia content and other requirements, which the CTIA told the FCC remains "fraught with practical and technical challenges." The New York State's Public Service Commission suggested that the FCC's well-meaning language proposal would face implementation hurdles. Instead, the FCC should "require WEAs to be translated to all languages spoken by at least 300,000 people, or 1%, of the United States population over