Restoring FCC Auction Authority a Top Focus for Competitive Carriers

Getting Congress to restore the FCC’s spectrum auction authority as quickly as possible is a top priority of the Competitive Carriers Association, CCA President Tim Donovan said Wednesday at the start of the group’s annual conference in Atlanta. Donovan also urged launching a 5G Fund, the topic of a September Further NPRM (see 2309210035).

For the first time in 30 years, the FCC has been unable to “perform this basic function of conducting auctions and assigning licenses,” which “poses a risk to U.S. wireless competitiveness,” Donovan said. CCA members rely on licensed spectrum to “offer our communities the latest wireless innovations and secure and reliable service,” he said. The expiration of auction authority hurts both CCA members and their customers, he said.

Other than the first phase of the mobility fund, the U.S. hasn’t had funding for mobile service in rural America since Apple released the 3G iPhone, Donovan said. “That is a long time -- we’re now on iPhone 15,” he said. Donovan also asked Congress to fully fund the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, which faces a $3.08 billion shortfall (see 2310120067). “For affected carriers, this is their No. 1 issue,” he said. “The clock is ticking for these carriers,” he said.

The postpaid market is “fiercely competitive” with new mobile virtual network operators surfacing, focused on driving down prices, said Adriana Rios Welton, UScellular general counsel, during a panel. “That’s bringing in a dynamic that is really, really tough to navigate, that requires a lot of flexibility,” she said.

Fixed wireless access has been a “bright spot,” with the quick growth difficult to predict, Welton said. She noted 90% of new households connecting to broadband last year used FWA. “We’re all still waiting for the killer use case,” she said. UScellular added 100,000 FWA customers during the summer, she said: “That is a huge boon, and understanding how to serve those customers well is important.”

Carolina West Wireless CEO Slayton Stewart also described the market as highly competitive. When Carolina West launched 4G, the “killer app” was streaming video, and customers were willing to pay extra for faster service, he said. 5G is “just a little bit faster. We don’t really have that killer app that anybody is looking at and saying, ‘Yes, I want to pay an extra $10, $15” per month, he said: “We really haven’t found a way to monetize 5G. … We’re still waiting for killer apps.”

Carolina West is having “pretty good success” with fixed wireless, with almost 4% of its customer base plugging in, Stewart said. The company sees FWA as “a great alternative” to satellite in rural markets, he said. “We’ve seen a lot of adoption in the most rural areas” but not as much in larger cities, he said.

Selling larger packages of services to customers “takes a lot more sophisticated sales process,” Stewart said. Fixed wireless is also “a different sales process” with different advertising, he said. The carrier found that to keep up with its FWA it had to quickly launch additional spectrum, and did so in the citizens broadband radio service band, he said. Every time a customer wants to buy FWA “we have to verify that we have the capacity to sell it sector by sector,” he said.

Appalachian Wireless, which is launching one of the first stand-alone 5G networks in the U.S., is exploring FWA and the IoT as growth areas, said Darlene Howell, director-customer relations. “It’s pretty overwhelming to dive into and figure out … where the sweet spot is,” she said. Appalachian also sees potential growth once network slicing launches, she said.

“We need to make sure that we’re on the cutting edge so that we can stay competitive” and customers don’t switch to a larger carrier, Howell said.

FWA has the highest net promoter score, a measure of customer loyalty, among all broadband offerings, said Surya Bommakanti, Ericsson vice president-cloud software and services, Customer Unit-Regional Carriers. That would have been difficult to predict two years ago, he said.

Private networks are also trending, Bommakanti said. Ericsson worked in North America with 200-300 private networks, but in China as many as 20,000 have launched, he said. That’s likely tied to China’s decision to launch 5G stand-alone networks, he said. The growth in China is “a pretty significant shot in the arm for the ecosystem” and “good news for everyone in the industry,” he said.

Spectrum is an issue in the U.S., Welton said. China has made 70% more mid-band available on a full-power, licensed basis than is available here, she said. “That really matters,” she said. The national spectrum strategy “still has not landed, we don’t know what our plan is there, and we have a lot of catching up to do,” she said. Federal policymakers haven’t adjusted to the advantages offered by FWA, Welton said. “This is a technology that works just as well as fiber does in some of these locations, and it brings mobility on top of it,” she said.