Rosenworcel Very Concerned About Draft CBRS Rules, Aide Says

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel has big concerns about the 3.5 GHz order set for a vote by commissioners Oct. 23, aide Umair Javed said at an FCBA event Wednesday. Erin McGrath, aide to Mike O’Rielly, defended the order's approach.

Revised rules for the CBRS band and proposed changes, circulated last week by Chairman Ajit Pai, are proving controversial (see 1810090055). The main concern is over the size of the priority access licenses that will be sold in an eventual FCC auction -- based on counties rather than the census tracts approved in 2015.

“We have concerns about where this item has come out,” Javed said. When the FCC approved the original rules, “we decided this was going to be a sharing band,” he said. “It was a little bit of an exercise in regulatory humility.” The FCC recognized it didn’t know who would have the best use case for 5G or the best business case for deployment, Javed said.

The approach in the 2015 order was to offer “opportunities,” Javed said. “The response was amazing,” Javed said. “We had a whole lot of interest from players that never” previously appeared before the FCC, he said. Industry got permission for 200 experimental uses of the band and invested hundreds of millions of dollars, he said. “There was something happening,” he said. “About a year ago, we put a stop to all that and we started negotiating a compromise that I don’t think we actually needed to negotiate.” Rather than finding the “best technical solution,” Pai and O’Rielly have proposed a “political compromise,” he said.

O’Rielly was concerned about census tracts since before the FCC approved the 2015 rules, McGrath said. Since last year’s NPRM, “there have been so many different discussions with so many different parties,” she said. Some proved ready to compromise and some didn’t, McGrath said: “Eventually, we had to come up with what path we thought was the best.” Census tracts aren’t a “good solution” for mobile or 5G, she said. Counties emerged as the optimal size for licenses, she said. “Not everyone is happy with that decision,” she conceded.

While some associations continue to advocate for census tracts, many members were saying “we can make counties work, too,” McGrath said. “It seemed to be the best compromise.” Since the original order, the 2.5 GHz band has emerged as a key band for 5G and 5G roaming, she said. “This is not like any other band we’ve ever done before,” since the FCC has never sold low- or mid-band spectrum in geographic sizes as small as counties, she said. “This is an experiment." The FCC has no idea who will bid in the PAL auction, she said. “Hopefully, everybody will come to play,” she said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for small and rural companies,” she said. “Counties aren’t that large.”

The Rosenworcel aide also raised questions about the approach on 5G and wireless infrastructure. The FCC approved the second of two major wireless infrastructure orders last month (see 1809260029). “We’ve done a lot of infrastructure items over the past year, but the FCC needs to make sure it’s making progress, Javed said. “There’s a couple of things that kind of give us pause.” All the infrastructure progress could be undermined by new tariffs on Chinese equipment, he said. The tariffs went into effect Sept. 24 and will increase 25 percent at the beginning of the year.

While the tariffs are important, “you wouldn’t know that from any of the infrastructure discussions at the agency,” Javed said. “We haven’t even asked the question could tariffs affect infrastructure deployment,” he said: “This is a blind spot” for the FCC, and most recent actions have gotten tied up in litigation or subject to other holds. “Get 5G out of the courts and kind of back on track,” he said.

The infrastructure orders have targeted local and state governments that aren’t working with industry on 5G “in good faith” McGrath said. Sometimes, the FCC gets local buy in, McGrath said. “I can’t come up with an infrastructure action that we’ve taken since I’ve been at the commission that hasn’t been challenged in court,” she said. “We can never seem to make everybody happy. We try our best.”

The FCC won after opponents tried to force a stay of the March infrastructure order, said Rachael Bender, wireless aide to Pai. “The team is busy implementing all of the changes,” she said. “We’re really trying our best.” On the C-band, McGrath said the FCC needs help from various players on addressing interference. Too often the argument is “the world will come to an end if you allow X,” she said. “We tend to be very skeptical of those claims if you can’t back them up.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the C-band,” said Will Adams, aide to Commissioner Brendan Carr. “It’ll be interesting to see if that’s successful … and whether that’s a model going forward in terms of private sector cooperation and information and overcoming a lot of the engineering issues.”