CTIA Sees Positive Movement on Restoring FCC Auction Authority

CTIA is hopeful a legislative vehicle will be found soon that will restore general FCC auction authority, more than a year after it lapsed, CTIA Senior Vice President-Spectrum Umair Javed said Wednesday during a Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy webcast. “It sort of feels like there’s a lot of smoke, and maybe not fire yet,” Javed said. He hopes a bill floated by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, will provide the needed “spark.”

The U.S. seems to be moving toward a view “that national power comes from our military holding on to spectrum assets -- that they need flexibility and that holding on to that spectrum is how they get it,” Javed said. Other countries believe national power comes from “the success of their commercial technologies and the ability to proliferate them around the world,” he said. China’s strategy is based on the latter view, he said.

The broader 3 GHz band is emerging as the key band for 5G in the U.S., Javed said. The lower 3 GHz band is the top wireless industry target as the next big 5G band. Javed noted that on April 8 CTIA will host a discussion with DOD on the national spectrum strategy implementation plan. “The more collaboration the better,” he said.

The implementation plan calls for “restudy” of the lower 3 GHz, “which we think is great,” Javed said (see 2403120006). DOD completed the initial study of the spectrum last year -- the congressionally mandated Emerging Mid-Band Radar Spectrum Sharing Feasibility Assessment (EMBRSS) -- and will now co-lead a study with NTIA.

The EMBRSS study “was flawed because it took options off the table from the get-go, and now we are going back and restudying those options,” Javed said. The options include segmentation, compression, retuning and repacking, he said. DOD will also further study dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technologies as work begins on the report, he said. CTIA expects airborne radar to be moved out of part of the band, but the EMBRSS report didn’t “really consider that,” he said: “We should be having the same conversation with every system in that band.”

Javed also questioned the U.S. decision to allocate spectrum to the shared citizens broadband radio service band, a topic CTIA has raised previously (see 2212120050). CBRS is “prime spectrum that’s now sub-optimized for 5G,” he said.

Wall Street hasn’t focused as much as it should on the lapse of FCC auction authority, said Jennifer Fritzsche, managing director of Greenhill and a senior fellow at the Georgetown center. Investors are still talking about Verizon’s big buy in the 2021 C-band auction and the need for the company to “digest” those costs, she said. Verizon bid $45.4 billion, plus $8 billion in incentive costs to satellite operators (see 2102250046).

The Street is focused on past investments more than the “lack” of a spectrum pipeline, Fritzsche said. But that's changing, especially as AT&T CEO John Stankey talks about the need for more spectrum, she said.

Carrier executives rarely mention 5G during financial calls these days compared with a few years ago, Fritzsche said. Companies need to show that the huge amounts they spent on spectrum are “worth it in terms of realizing eventual revenue gains,” she said: “The jury is still out.”

Prices in the C-band auction were a result of spectrum scarcity, Javed said. “There really wasn’t mid-band spectrum available” and bids were higher than anyone anticipated, he said.

The C-band auction stands in sharp contrast to the $4.54 billion raised in the CBRS auction (see 2009020057), said Whitworth Analytics' Carolyn Brandon, senior fellow at the Georgetown center. “It was an incredibly small number when you look at what was raised in C band,” she said. Brandon questioned whether CBRS should be looked at as a model for DSS. Fixed wireless access and open radio access networks need more spectrum, she said.

There’s a lot of confusion about what DSS is, though it has become "the hot topic,” Javed said. About half the initiatives in the national spectrum strategy are focused on dynamic sharing capability “but at the same time there’s no definition of what that is.”