At the 13th Americas Spectrum Management Conference, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez acknowledged a fundamental truth about our current spectrum landscape: “In today’s spectrum reality, shared spectrum has to be part of the discussion.” Simply put, no more greenfield spectrum is available, so we must prioritize innovative solutions that allow multiple users to share the same frequencies.
Thankfully, we have a clear blueprint for success via the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), where a shared spectrum framework is actively helping deliver wireless connectivity for a wide range of operators and consumers alike, without interfering with military radar and other national security operations.
Commissioner Gomez explained that “CBRS has demonstrated that shared spectrum schemes are not only possible but successful and can scale up to incorporate developments, protect incumbents, create more access, and encourage new market entrants.”
In contrast to high-powered, exclusively licensed spectrum—which typically takes several years, comes with increasingly huge costs to relocate existing users, and is often only utilized by a small handful of massive companies—shared spectrum allows for more diverse applications, more competition between users, and more innovation in the technologies critical to America’s wireless future. It also takes less time to deploy and reduces costs, which delivers faster results for consumers.
For example, at Digital Global Systems (DGS), we’ve spent years developing radio frequency (RF) monitoring technologies to make spectrum management more dynamic. Our technology and software, supported by a portfolio of over 230 patents, can analyze and optimize RF spectrum applications and network operations in real time.
This allows our partners to truly understand the devices and services using their wireless spectrum. In turn, this data can be used to deliver greater network performance while ensuring unused spectrum is available for businesses, government organizations, schools, and rural communities. It makes real-time spectrum sharing faster and simpler to implement, easier to update, and more affordable to use.
As a result, more users are taking advantage of dynamic sharing in the CBRS band to meet local needs. However, continued progress will depend on regulators’ willingness to protect what makes the band special.
A recent FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) opened a review of various proposals to change the operating parameters for CBRS. The FCC should not upset the careful balance it struck years ago when it established technical standards like power levels and emission limits. Those principles have spurred considerable investment and innovation, and changing the rules midstream will be particularly disruptive and stunt the growth and investment in CBRS to date.
In particular, higher power levels and emissions limits would fundamentally alter the nature of CBRS, undercutting the low–power, “local spectrum” approach that empowers a wide variety of users to share the same spectrum band in smaller, more precise footprints. This would reduce the number of potential users and licensees, potentially generate additional adjacent-channel interference, and unnecessarily complicate and threaten existing CBRS uses.
If higher power levels and emission limits were applied, they could also interfere with the Department of Defense’s (DoD) existing operations in the band, such as missile defense and radar. This risk of greater interference would essentially force the DoD to significantly expand exclusion zones, reducing commercial use of the CBRS spectrum and the number of users.
That is why we cannot listen to the big carriers who want to use high-power signals to tamp down competition from a growing ecosystem of CBRS users.
Instead, leaders should be working to protect innovative, low-power solutions that have fostered unique use cases across the country – solutions that are critical to America’s wireless future, job creation, and our ability to protect mission-critical national security functions. Commissioner Gomez said that the “CBRS story is one of American ingenuity to create solutions in the face of scarcity.” We couldn’t agree more – and it’s vital that we protect this ingenuity to ensure spectrum sharing in the CBRS band can continue to power our future.
