With U.S. Delegation Quiet, Progress Reported Slow at WRC

The U.S. delegation to the World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai has been quiet two weeks into the long-awaited conference. Steve Lang, the State Department official who replaced now-Commissioner Anna Gomez as delegation head, will not hold a news conference until after the WRC concludes Dec. 15, a spokesperson confirmed.

Industry officials said it’s too early in the process to reach conclusions on whether the U.S. will be generally successful in what it’s trying to accomplish at the conference. The event's early days haven’t seen much progress on most agenda items, as was expected, we’re told. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations’ running list of agenda items and status shows most “in progress.”

The first week of a WRC sees administrations sticking to their positions and little progress is made, emailed River Advisers CEO Katherine Gizinski. Movement starts in week two, with substantive compromises not coming perhaps until week three, she said. The general feeling is that progress so far has been particularly slow, “which isn’t entirely unexpected given what’s at stake,” she said. Some meetings started stretching late into the night in week two, which usually doesn’t come until week three, she said.

Federal officials had said heading into the conference that while preparation was difficult, the U.S. was ready (see 2310270047). But FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and former Chairman Ajit Pai warned the U.S. has a weak hand to play versus China (see 2311170056), which is targeting the addition of almost 1,500 MHz for international mobile telecommunications (IMT).

The only news release the ITU has put out since the Nov. 20 start of the WRC highlighted a framework for the development of standards and radio interface technologies for 6G (see 2312010034).

6 GHz

Alex Roytblat, Wi-Fi Alliance vice president-regulatory affairs, who is at WRC, said a key area of negotiations among member countries has centered on the risk of IMT interference to terrestrial and satellite incumbents in the upper-6 GHz band.

“The WRC-23 negotiations are complicated by the fact that spectrum sharing studies carried out at the ITU over the last four years, in preparation for the conference, are inconclusive, with many studies indicating that IMT networks cannot coexist with the 6 GHz incumbents,” Roytblat emailed: “Several countries, including the US, are firmly opposed to the IMT designation in the 6 GHz band because it would destabilize existing regulatory framework and ongoing deployments without delivering socioeconomic benefits or technological advances." He said other countries "are grasping at various regulatory contortions such as deferring the actual implementation of the WRC-23 decision until 2030 so as to allow incumbents to transition out of the 6 GHz band.”

Awareness among policymakers is growing that 6 GHz Wi-Fi “is the real telecom success story,” Roytblat said. “Regulatory solutions developed by the FCC and replicated in over 60 countries are enabling a thriving 6 GHz Wi-Fi ecosystem with over 2000 products already on the market and, importantly, with full protection to the incumbent operations.” Roytblat said he’s optimistic that, “in the remaining two weeks, administrations at WRC-23 will prioritize the 6 GHz existing services and Wi-Fi connectivity over warehousing this valuable spectrum for a hypothetical IMT.”

The ITU has posted a series of short interviews from the WRC, including one with Geraldo Neto, vice president at consulting Telecommunications Management Group, who was elected to chair a working group on future agenda items.

Some discussions have been “a bit intense” with some disagreements, Neto said in an interview posted Monday. “We are halfway through the discussions, and hopefully we can get to good results,” he said. “I still believe that the process we do is the correct one when we involve everyone,” he said: “We have government officials, we have the industry, we have everyone that is from the sector here defending their own positions.” The committee needs to find “commonalities” through a “consensus building process,” he said. “In the end it’s the greater good that we’re achieving here,” he said.

The WRC has proven effective in providing bands for IMT, said Eiman Mohyeldin, Nokia head-spectrum standardization. The decisions at the WRC are “important for the whole mobile industry,” she said. “It’s important to have the right study bands for the future,” she said. 6G “will make a big difference” with its focus on “ultra-reliable” networks with “ultra-low latency,” with lower energy demands, she said. Mohyeldin supported identifying the upper-6 GHz band, allocated for unlicensed use in the U.S., for IMT.

One agenda item that has seen action is 9.1(c), regarding study of IMT for fixed wireless broadband in frequency bands allocated to the fixed services on a primary basis, with a decision to not change radio regulations. Gizinski said going into WRC-23, the satellite universe had been deeply concerned about its potential impact on all fixed satellite service allocations with the introduction of mobile users. “While there are many threats to satellite spectrum access still at play, this one is held off to the next cycle,” she said.

A coalition lead by Amazon continues to push the case for updates to satellite power limit rules (see 2310310039) with the Alliance for Satellite Broadband last week releasing a paper by economist and former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth. The paper was partially underwritten by Amazon and was in response to a Viasat/Brattle Group paper arguing against changing equivalent power flux-density levels (EPFD). The costs imposed on geostationary orbit networks would be high relative to incremental economic benefits from the changes, Brattle said. It said GSO networks would lose capacity from degraded interference protections while also driving up their costs, “potentially push[ing] out some GSO operators from the market, or limit[ing] their operations.” A Hudson Institute senior fellow, Furchtgott-Roth said sunk costs shouldn’t affect decisions to change rules and the Brattle report provides no evidence that updated EPFD rules would hurt either innovation or competition. He said an update would expand non-GSO system capacity, and the distributional effects of such an update “are likely positive.”