CBRS Alliance President Says Initial Deployments Are Going Well; FCC Expected to Act Soon

It's difficult to gauge how the citizens broadband radio service launch has gone so far. In September, the FCC, in docket 15-319 cleared Amdocs, CommScope, Federated Wireless, Google and Sony to start initial commercial deployment (ICD) in the 3.5 GHz band, but the companies aren’t required to publicly report numbers. CBRS Alliance President Dave Wright of CommScope told us initial numbers are proprietary, but CBRS is moving forward as expected with full-scale launch imminent. “I continue to be extremely excited,” Wright said.

“We’ve been just sort of waiting” for the FCC, DOD and NTIA to complete their reviews of those ICD reports, Wright told us. “We’re expecting another public notice from the commission, which will authorize full commercial operation.” He said he expects the notice to be released in the next few weeks. The FCC and NTIA didn’t comment. Wright said the alliance isn't targeting the upcoming CES to display CBRS progress.

The FCC has approved a three-tiered access and sharing model among federal and nonfederal incumbents, priority access licensees (PALs), and general authorized access users, with spectrum access system (SAS) administrators managing use of the band. The first use of the band is in the GAA tier, with the FCC auction of PALs to start June 25.

The initial plans for ICD were filed a year ago and included “the locations, where are you going to deploy, what kinds of radios,” Wright said. In September, the FCC authorized “the execution of those plans,” he said. “While we’re still in this ICD phase, if it’s within the scope of what was submitted in your proposal … you’re free to do it.”

Wright said CommScope, as a SAS administrator, has seen some of the numbers. “There has been good activity in the band, since ICD was authorized and certainly has ramped pretty consistently from the Sept. 16 authorization and continues to ramp,” he said. The use cases have included use of the band by wireless carriers, cable operators, fixed wireless providers and industrial and other businesses, Wright said. “The bottom line is that the ICD period has gone well,” he said.

The alliance has 156 members, with some big adds in the last quarter, Wright said. Membership includes big tech companies and the major carriers and cable operators, plus wireless ISPs and end users, he noted.

The alliance held an event to mark the launch in September (see 1909180020) with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and DOD officials. In October Chairman Ajit Pai spoke to the alliance (see 1910240026). “If the sharing regime works as we expect, we can continue to fine-tune the system, adjusting protection zones and power levels," Pai said then.

Everything is coming together perfectly and the commission is right on track for a successful auction in June," said a former FCC spectrum official.

Skeptics remain. “The history of technology is littered with the corpses of clever schemes that work well in controlled settings but don’t scale under real world conditions,” said network architect Richard Bennett: “It remains to be seen whether CBRS is one of these or a genuine breakthrough. We’re going to learn a lot in the upcoming year.”

Deployments have been limited, “but Apple included band support for CBRS in its most recent line of iPhones and I expect Samsung and other [handset makers] will do the same with their next lines of flagship smartphones, so I think 2020 will be the year CBRS finally goes mainstream and moves from theory to reality,” said Tom Struble, tech policy manager at the R Street Institute. Success isn’t guaranteed “given the complicated sharing regime that had to be put in place to protect the DOD incumbents,” he said. “If the SAS model works, it would be a major breakthrough in spectrum management and potentially open up multiple new bands for commercial deployments going forward, but we won't know whether or how well it works until the PALs come online following the auctions next summer.”

“To see the future spectrum market, look at the introduction of CBRS in USA, a model likely to spread and which is creating a new value chain and dynamic market,” said John Strand of Strand Consult in his year-end predictions: “Many new and exciting companies have already entered and created equipment and services.”