TAC Told of 5G's Role in Digital Divide

The FCC Technological Advisory Council heard about efforts to close the digital divide, and its challenges, at Friday's meeting, TAC's first for 2019. Fifth-generation wireless was a focus of the meeting. Alianza adviser John Barnhill said the biggest rural need is coverage, but 5G's strength is in speed, and rural markets also carry particularly high backhaul, interconnect and antenna costs. So 5G "is not a silver bullet" for rural connectivity, and the fix will require a mix of satellite, Wi-Fi, LTE, better antenna designs and rural funding that incentivizes investment in lower density areas, he said. New York University Wireless founding Director Ted Rappaport said 5G "is the best thing that ever could have happened to rural." He said millimeter-wave spectrum and a line of sight in a rural area can accomplish the same as mid-band spectrum in a more urban area, and fixed point-to-point backhaul using the 27, 37 and 39 GHz bands could replace aging copper. Carriers could be motivated by regulatory approaches that emphasize that kind of deployment, he said. "No one's going to do it on their own." Dyna's Martin Cooper, co-chair of a TAC group, said the rural digital divide threatens to be a "digital chasm" for education, with one possible response being private enterprise being incentivized for rural deployment by allowing use of schools and libraries as cellsites. He said the FCC could prioritize rural spectrum availability to operators providing coverage for education. AT&T Assistant Vice President-Standards and Industry Alliances Brian Daly said projections point to 10 million 5G subscriptions in the U.S. by year's end, and that by 2024, such networks will carry 35 percent of the globe's mobile traffic. Carriers are involved in 95 5G U.S. city deployments now, he said. Daly said the potentially billions of IoT devices in the field within a few years will easily outstrip IPv4 capacity. He said deploying 5G with IPv6 would still support IPv4 but also handle that traffic.