State Department is requesting the band be officially recognized for 5G
As the U.S. federal government continues its efforts to identify additional spectrum for mobile network use, particularly in the midband range, the U.S. State Department is beginning the process to have 3.3-3.4 GHz become an officially recognized 5G band in the Americas region.
According to a joint statement from the Department of Defense and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the U.S. State Department is submitting a proposal to the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission (CITEL), held this month in Mexico City, to open 3.3-3.4 GHz for 5G mobile services within the Americas region. If the regional proposal is accept at CITEL, it will be bumped up to the November 2023 World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC-23) in Dubai for consideration.
“By submitting this proposal, which defines protections for incumbent services in this band, the U.S. Government is protecting critical operations and capabilities, while enabling use of the 3300-3400 MHz band for 5G mobile services by countries that wish to do so,” NTIA and DoD said in a joint statement.
However, both agencies said that they also “jointly emphasize” that their support for the 3.3-3.4 GHz proposal “does not prejudice the results of the Congressionally directed study examining the feasibility of sharing the broader lower 3 GHz band or its recommendations about domestic use of the band.”
In other words, the domestic process for hashing out how that spectrum could be used or shared is still underway and neither agency wants to commit itself to specifics about what that could look like. The federal infrastructure bill passed in November 2021 provided $50 million in funding for DoD to study and plan for making spectrum available in its holdings between 3.1-3.45 GHz. A recent recap of related spectrum issues from the Congressional Research Service noted that the Department of Defense has both classified and unclassified operations in that spectrum range.
Complicating ongoing spectrum issues further is that the Federal Communications Commission’s statutory authority to auction spectrum was allowed to lapse in March and has not been reinstated, despite repeated calls from carriers and telecom industry groups for Congress to do so.
Federal-level interest in freeing up more midband spectrum from 3.1 GHz on up has been under consideration from around 2010, and has so far resulted in the three-tiered sharing framework in the CBRS band at 3.55 GHz, as well as the auction of 100 megahertz at 3.45-3.55 GHz that includes substantial coordination zones to protect DoD operations. The DoD’s CIO, John Sherman, said at a September 2022 NTIA Spectrum Policy Symposium in Washington, D.C., that “Sharing is … what we must do in the 3.1-3.45 part of the spectrum.” (Transcript available here.)
“For us to have to vacate this part of the spectrum would be absolutely untenable,” Sherman added, speaking about DoD operations. “It would take us two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to be able to refactor and move those radars out of there. Let me say that again: decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to move out of that space. But sharing offers us a way ahead out of this.”
