T-Band Legislation Only Possible as Part of a COVID Bill, EWA Chief Tells ICWE

Congress will never act on a stand-alone bill that would block the FCC from making public safety vacate the 470-512 MHz T band, Enterprise Wireless Alliance President Mark Crosby told the virtual IWCE conference Thursday. The House Commerce Committee approved the Don’t Break Up the T-Band Act (HR-451) in July (see 2007150068). Crosby said the bill can get through only if appended to a COVID-19 stimulus package.

The FCC is also moving forward on the T-band. Comments are due Monday, replies Sept. 29, on an FCC NPRM to “take the next statutorily required step to implement” the 2012 spectrum law's mandate for public safety to move off the 470-512 MHz T band (see 2005150053). The need to move public safety off the T-band for a 2021 auction is left over “damage” from that legislation that created FirstNet, Crosby said.

The T-band is used in 11 cities, “but there’s a big part of the country where the senators and congressmen, they don’t even know what T-band is and their constituents don’t have access to T-band,” Crosby said. “There are major public safety systems … that rely on T-Band, that are used for health and safety and everything else,” he said. “If there’s ever a time not to jeopardize these communications systems that rely on T-band, it’s now,” he said.

“You’re not going have an auction in 2021 … but you can start the process,” Crosby said. Some issues will “never be resolved,” he said. The act has no mention of the business and private carrier operators that are the “majority incumbents” in five of 11 T-band cities, he said. “I don’t know whether that was because people didn’t do their research or someone didn’t want to do their research,” he said: “The commission now has to handle it one way or another.”

According to FCC licensing records, 925 public safety entities hold licenses in the T-band, including in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Washington, D.C.

The VHF band, also used by public safety, is shared by analog and digital systems “on the same channel sometimes,” said Alan Tilles of Shulman Rogers. Except for spectrum used by the railroads, “it’s generally unpaired, so you wind up having a variety of different kinds of uses on each channel,” he said.

Tilles said as the number of VHF users declines “it may be possible to take a relook … and possibly have a repurposing of the band to make perhaps paired channels or, perhaps, broader channels for a variety of different kind of data uses, or something else,” he said: “That will be something that we need to keep an eye on.”

Some view 5G as “a panacea” and others view it “as just another generation of wireless technology, what’s the big deal about it,” said Prakash Sangam, principal at Tantra Analyst, during a 5G panel. “The truth is somewhere in between.” 5G growth has been “remarkable” given the COVID-19 pandemic, which has largely not slowed the launch, he said. “5G can improve what’s already there, in a big way, but also enable many new things,” he said.

5G is completely different from earlier generations of wireless, said Verizon's Junaid Islam. In 5G “we have a completely distributed computing model, that is we can route packets from one phone to another or from a phone to a cloud directly and that didn’t exist in earlier generations,” he said. 5G “allows us to completely reimagine or reconceptualize how we support large-scale infrastructure systems,” he said. The phone becomes “an agent or client,” he said: “My phone can actually get compute processes pushed to it in real time and actually do local execution of code.”

“We are as an industry going into areas that we have really never gone before,” said Chris Pearson, president of 5G Americas, who also spoke on the panel. “As you move to 5G, and continue to progress 5G … some of those limitations are gone.”