Dish granted permission to conduct tests at RF ‘quiet zone’ in Colorado
Dish Wireless has received permission from the Federal Communications Commission to experiment with CBRS outdoor power transmission limits that go beyond those currently allowed.
According to Dish’s Special Temporary Authority filing, the technical study is being conducted with assistance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) lab; the testing will be conducted at the Table Mountain Radio Quiet Zone outside Boulder, Colorado, near NIST’s Colorado facility.
Dish will be testing CBRS spectrum at 3.65-3.69 GHz, using 5G with two transmitters at 0.5 watts and up to 1.585 kilowatts of power. The operator said that it wants to conduct the experiments to evaluate what the improvements to coverage, throughput and spectral efficiency would be with high-power CBRS operations, as well as what the impact would be to current General Authorized Access (GAA) and Priority Access License (PAL) operations in terms of whether base stations or end-user devices might be blocked under the higher-power conditions. Dish said in its filing that it also wants to test what the impact to GAA/PAL operations would be “if the in-band emission requirement of -25 dBm/MHz is waived to align with [the] adjacent C-Band.”
Dish is a major holder of PAL licenses and has been advocating for higher-power operations in the CBRS band. The company spent $912.9 million on 5,492 licenses in 3,128 counties in the PAL auction. For context, licenses were available in 3,233 U.S. counties, meaning that Dish used the auction to build itself a nationwide footprint of priority access to the 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum.
Operators and network equipment manufacturers have been asking the FCC for several years to re-think the power limits on CBRS transmission, because of the hurdles that the lower limits pose for CBRS deployment as part of macro cellular networks. The FCC has thus far not shown any inclination toward adjusting the power levels of CBRS operations, but the agency’s permission for Dish’s testing will allow some new technical information to enter the conversation.
Interestingly, even testing these higher-power operations requires not just the FCC’s permission, but some additional hurdles because of the underlying systems that enable CBRS operations. Dish’s filing includes an email from Spectrum Access System operator Federated Wireless which notes that its SAS cannot accept a registered transmitter operating at a power level that violates FCC limits—so the identification of local incumbents and CBRS channel management has to be conducted manually, rather than through the SAS.
