Fear of the Unknown Played Too Big of Role at Last WRC: NTIA Official

One of the big surprises from the World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai, which ended in December, was the role that fear played in many of the negotiations, Charles Glass, chief of the International Spectrum Policy Division in NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management, said during an FCBA webinar Wednesday.

There was “fear from the delegations of the unknown,” Glass said. “There was fear that the U.S. and others were getting out ahead of them” and there were attempts to block some items because some delegates “didn’t understand the regulatory environment better, and they didn’t understand the technical issues better,” he said.

The U.S. made “inroads” near the end of the conference, “but it took a lot of work for our delegation -- work that we shouldn’t have had to do,” Glass said.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do on the space side in terms of informing, educating and sort of demystifying some of these technologies,” said Ethan Lucarelli, chief of the FCC Office of International Affairs. There were discussions at the WRC “that were harder than they needed to be,” he said.

The top U.S. goals were “connectivity and innovation, unlocking the space economy in the next generation of space science, and protecting our national security and transportation safety,” said Kelly O’Keefe, ITU team lead at the State Department. Those goals seem “very broad” but reflect that the U.S. has interests “in nearly all the agenda items,” she said.

The U.S. had mostly “good outcomes” at the WRC and set the stage for success at the next WRC in 2027, O’Keefe said. The WRC involves complicated negotiations that are “technical, but also political,” she said. A month for the WRC seems “insane” to outsiders, “but it was very action-packed throughout the entire time period,” she said.

All WRCs are a little different, O’Keefe said. “You learn your lessons based on each one, and you retool, but then you have to be able to react” as things change, she said. Regional relationships, and the leadership of the different groups and committees all matter, she said.

There isn’t an agenda item that the FCC doesn’t have an interest in, Lucarelli said. “It’s difficult to say, ‘well, our top priorities were these three or four things' because that seems like you’re excluding the other 25 things,” he said. All the priorities are “top priorities,” which makes WRC challenging for a small FCC team, he said.

Companies and industry groups can focus on their individual items, Lucarelli said. “From the government perspective, everything has to matter to us,” he said. “We also were very focused on trying to have a manageable and positive agenda for the next WRC,” he said. The WRC didn’t provide a "perfect result" for anyone, he said: “That’s the nature of a negotiated resolution. You never get everything that you wanted.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel gave his team “the flexibility to be able to act and react on the ground,” Lucarelli said. Industry also helped “when we needed to come up with alternatives, when we needed to think about what really matters,” he said.

“Everything is a priority to someone and at the end, in our preparatory process, we have position papers on every single agenda item, we have spokespeople identified for every single agenda item,” Glass said. We have to rely on expertise from industry because government representatives “can’t do it all,” he said. Building relationships with other nations is also critical, he said.

The most important item for the wireless industry was agenda item 1.2, focused on making additional mid-band spectrum available for 5G, said Daudeline Meme, Verizon vice president-federal regulatory and legal. Identification of the 3.3-3.4 and 3.6-3.8 GHz bands in the Americas region for international mobile telecommunications “was a key success for the mobile industry,” she said. The WRC also approved a future agenda item (FAI) for WRC-27 on a licensed spectrum pipeline, she said. “This was critical, as going into the conference there really was no clear spectrum road map internationally,” she said.

There was a concerted effort to discuss FAIs early in the conference, Meme said. That was a reaction to a concern felt after the 2019 conference that these items were jammed into the final days of the meeting, she said. That meant “delegates had to work extremely long hours from the very beginning of the second week of the conference,” she said: “There are only so many hours in the day.”