CCA Ramping Up Pressure on Congress to Approve Rip-and-Replace Funding

Competitive Carriers Association CEO Tim Donovan on Wednesday urged Congress to fully fund the FCC's Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program (see 2304210069). Carriers, consumers “and the millions of Americans that roam on these networks must not be negatively impacted by insufficient funding,” Donovan said at the start of the group’s spring show in Pittsburgh.

Donovan noted CCA is running commercials in the Washington, D.C., media market on the importance of Congress providing an additional $3.08 billion to pay for removing insecure equipment from small carrier networks. The proposed Defend Our Networks Act would reallocate 3% of unspent and unobligated funding from the FY 2021 appropriations omnibus, the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act and other COVID-19 aid packages to make up the rip and replace program’s deficit.

“Tensions are increasing with China, and this critical national security program remains billions of dollars short,” the commercials assert: “Congress has only weeks left to fix it and we’re running out of time. … America’s national security is not negotiable.”

CCA is working to make sure wireless projects are funded under the broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program, Donovan said. “All consumers deserve robust access to wireless services -- the preferred choice of consumers,” he said. Congress intended that “all technologies would play a role to close the digital divide,” he said: “Time is of the essence to get these policies right.”

Spectrum access it “a vitally important issue for all carriers, especially smaller carriers with limited resources,” Donovan said. He said policymakers should focus on mid-band “with clear interagency processes.”

2.5 GHz

Following the lapse of FCC spectrum auction authority, T-Mobile believes the agency could “easily” approve grants of special temporary authority (see 2304060062) to get the spectrum into play, said John Hunter, senior director-technology and engineering policy: “We think the commission has the authority to issue the licenses. The money has been paid, the auction concluded.”

The FCC appears to be “pushing hard” to get Congress to reauthorize its auction authority, and key members of Congress understand what’s at stake and “the critical inflection point that we’re at,” said Rebecca Murphy Thompson, UScellular vice president-government affairs. The company is “pretty confident” Congress will act.

Approving experimental licenses in the 2.5 GHz band is a “very elegant way” to address T-Mobile’s concerns and act quickly, said Robert Kubik, Samsung senior director-public policy, engineering and technology. “It’s unreasonable … to delay the spectrum coming to market” especially since T-Mobile is required to pay for the licenses under a strict timeline, he said.

DOD is looking at repurposing portions of the 3.1-3.45 GHz band for 5G, as directed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (see 2111120050), but the study has limitations, Hunter said. It looks at interference into DOD systems but not commercial systems, he said.

DOD systems transmit at much higher power levels than commercial networks, Hunter said. “It’s going to do us little good if we can show somehow through technical arrangements within our networks that we can protect DOD only to find as we turn up our networks we have so much interference that it renders our networks useless,” he said: “We have to look at both sides of the coin. … That’s the only way really you get sharing to work in this band.”

CBRS Questioned

The executives agreed with CTIA that the citizens broadband radio service underperforms versus licensed spectrum. NTIA made a counterargument this week (see 2305010063).

UScellular found that CBRS, with its low-power levels, covers a 1.5 km radius, compared with 9 km for the C band, Thompson said. “That’s just a 40 times more efficient use of spectrum,” she said. The carrier has found its CBRS licenses to be “very operationally challenging, especially in rural areas,” she said.

Carrier infrastructure in rural America was designed for standard-power low- and mid-band spectrum and the lower power level for CBRS requires building more cellsites, said David Zylka, Carolina West Wireless chief technology officer. The carrier is starting to deploy CBRS and has found limitations. Zylka said the carrier recently installed CBRS on a tower on a mountaintop near a population center. “When we put in CBRS at a lower power level it doesn’t really propagate down to where the people are,” he said.

Smaller carriers need a federal strategy on spectrum, Zylka said. “When you lay out a multiyear strategy of bands you’re trying to open up, it gives us time to analyze our equipment, receivers, transmitters,” he said.

Kubik said “high-level principles” on receivers, approved by the FCC last month (see 2304200040), rightly focus on a band-by-band approach. “If you try to do … a receiver standard for everything you’re not going to boil that ocean, you’re not going to get to a solution,” he said. “You have to have some rules of the road” on receivers, Hunter said: “I can see where manufacturers would want to have a very liberal receiver standard.”