Howard Buskirk

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s Project 2025 ties likely won’t damage his chances of becoming the agency's chair if Donald Trump is elected president in November, even though the Trump campaign has distanced itself from the project (see 2407110054). Commissioner Nathan Simington is listed as a project adviser but didn’t write a chapter, as Carr did, or play a more public role.

North East Offshore is dropping its request for an FCC waiver of the freeze on nonfederal applications for new or expanded Part 90 operations in the lower 3 GHz band. The renewable energy company notified the agency that it’s modifying its application to “specify frequencies outside the 3.1-3.3 GHz band, which will eliminate the need” for the FCC to consider a waiver. The request ran into opposition from the wireless and cable industries, which filed comments posted Thursday in docket 24-212. The comments underscore the perceived importance of lower 3 GHz spectrum for 5G and beyond.

T-Mobile on Wednesday became the last of the three major wireless carriers to report Q2 results, announcing it added 777,000 net postpaid phone subscribers and 406,000 fixed wireless subscribers. However, it warned of a financial hit of up to $450 million this year from the shuttering of the affordable connectivity program. Meanwhile, CEO Mike Sievert told analysts T-Mobile is “open-minded” but not set on buying additional fiber assets.

The three major U.S. tower companies reported Q2 results, with Crown Castle the last to go, on Tuesday. All three companies' CEOs said that despite some slowing in 5G deployments, major U.S. carriers still have a ways to go to build out their networks. In addition, they expressed optimism despite a downturn in deployments in recent quarters (see 2402290050).

Carriers are embracing open radio access networks as they “introduce” more virtualization, intelligence and “ultimately automation” into their networks, Stefan Pongratz, Dell’Oro Group vice president-RAN market research, said during a Fierce Network webinar Tuesday on ORAN indoors. Del Oro recently projected that global RAN revenue will decline at a 2% compound average growth rate through 2028 (see 2407260041). “Within that there are pockets of the RAN market that are growing,” including ORAN, small cells, millimeter-wave deployments and fixed wireless access, Pongratz said. A big challenge for AMB Sports and Entertainment, which manages Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, is keeping up with fan demand, Chief Information Officer Kevin Pope said. “We actually have to track a different demand line when you think of events like the SEC [college football] Championship, a Taylor Swift concert, a FIFA World Cup game, the Super Bowl,” he said. The demands are higher than for average events, he added. Connectivity is “something we take seriously, but it’s a moving target.” Customers don’t care about which technology is used, “they just want to have a good experience" but "we need to have all these tools in our toolbox.” If people are reading email, “that’s one thing,” Pope said, but if thousands of fans are trying to stream high-resolution video at the same time that requires a different set of tools. His company uses a distributed antenna system and Wi-Fi but also millimeter-wave spectrum in areas where it expects the highest bandwidth demands. At the biggest events, during the halftime of a football game or a set break at a concert, the demand peaks “are just staggering.” You also have to deal with customer preferences, Pope said: Some customers have limited data plans so they want to use Wi-Fi, while others may not trust Wi-Fi. The initial focus with any new generation of wireless is on outdoor, macro coverage, said Upendra Pingle, CommScope senior vice president-intelligent cellular networks. When that’s done, the focus moves to in-building coverage, starting with large public venues, followed by more general network densification, he said. “This cycle repeats every decade … and we’ll see the same thing on 6G.” Pingle said carriers are focusing more on high-band deployments “because that’s where high bandwidth is available” for “massive, data-hungry use cases.” With millimeter-wave, the signals don’t penetrate buildings very well and “a dedicated in-building solution becomes more and more important.” With that comes the need for “an open, virtualized architecture to deploy in-building cellular to cover all the use cases,” he said. As venues consider millimeter-wave spectrum, it has to make sense for them financially given the costs. “The use case has to be balanced with the business case.” High-band will have its place, “but it's going to have to be a specific application dealing with a specific use case,” Pingle said.

A case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Consumers' Research, et al. v. Consumer Product Safety Commission, potentially has major implications for the FCC and FTC, and could permit a president to fire a commissioner at will, industry lawyers said. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative groups are asking SCOTUS in amicus filings to grant the writ of certiorari from Consumers' Research.

CTIA Thursday marked the 30th anniversary of the FCC’s first spectrum auction by calling on Congress to restore the agency’s lapsed general auction authority. “For the past three decades, this Nobel-prize winning innovation has become increasingly key to America’s economic competitiveness and innovation leadership,” CTIA President Meredith Baker said. The anniversary is “an important reminder of the critical role that auctions play, and we call on policymakers to restore auction authority with a spectrum pipeline so that we can secure the benefits of wireless leadership for all Americans,” she said. CTIA also released the opening video of what it said will be a series of remembrances about auctions and the early days of the wireless industry. “The essential asset of wireless communications is spectrum,” former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler said in the first video. Wheeler noted that he became involved in wireless as part of a group of investors that won spectrum licenses in one of the lotteries that predated auctions, “the FCC’s dumbest way of allocating spectrum.” His group’s pingpong balls were picked “and suddenly I was in the wireless industry.” Licenses were also assigned through “beauty contests,” where companies made the case at the FCC on why they needed spectrum in a given area, he said. “That may have solved the instant problem, but it certainly didn’t facilitate how do you then have a concerted effort to deliver the important services,” Wheeler said: “It was widely understood that the … system was flawed.” Tom Sugrue, former head of the D.C. office for T-Mobile, said licenses' value increased rapidly “as people began to appreciate what mobile technology was worth.” But the “tools the FCC had to assign those licenses were becoming increasingly, obviously deficient.”

The citizens broadband radio service band has shown that spectrum can be shared without interfering with government users, in particular the naval radars that use the band, Richard Bernhardt, Wireless ISP Association vice president-spectrum and industry, said Thursday. Recent changes approved by the FCC, working with DOD and NTIA (see 2406120027), will make the band much more usable, he said during a WISPA webinar on “CBRS 2.0.” The rule changes take effect Friday.

The Biden administration appears headed toward a coordination and licensing framework in the lower 37 GHz band, one of five targeted for further study in the administration’s national spectrum strategy (see 2311130048). Analysts told us wireless carriers likely have little interest in seeing the band set aside for licensed use, unlike some other bands the administration is studying, especially lower 3 GHz and 7/8 GHz. The FCC will probably seek comment on 37 GHz in a public notice “on or about” Aug. 6, NTIA said in a recent blog.

AT&T CEO John Stankey on Wednesday criticized the Biden administration’s work on making more spectrum available for wireless carriers. During the carrier's release of Q2 results, Stankey apologized for the February AT&T wireless outage, the topic of an FCC report this week (see 2407220034).