5G FNPRM May Get a Rare 5-0 Vote for a Big-Ticket FCC Item, O'Rielly Says
The FCC plans to tee up a Further NPRM in July that will explore freeing up yet further spectrum for wireless 5G, Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said at a 5G seminar hosted Wednesday by Hogan Lovells. O'Rielly said that the current spectrum frontier proceeding is likely to pass and represents one of the few major items likely to get unanimous commissioner approval. The bands in it likely won't be sufficient to meet all 5G needs, he said.
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O'Rielly didn't specify what bands might be addressed in the FNPRM. John Hunter, T-Mobile spectrum policy director, said 37.5-42.5 GHz “is ideal. No incumbents, nobody's there." While that spectrum has been allocated to satellite applications, Hunter said that "the satellite industry has not deployed in those bands for some time. That would be the band I'd home in on." The satellite industry has refuted that (see 1605200057).
The FCC might have to get more involved in issues of access to local rights of way, ensuring localities don't delay 5G deployment by using its existing authority "to hold localities accountable" for their review processes and decisions, O'Rielly said. "I realize this triggers the verboten word 'pre-emption,'" he said. Local zoning or planning regimes that spell out specific numbers of poles and towers are "not workable" in a 5G model, where density of deployments might be ten times what they were for 4G, O'Rielly said: "We have to figure out how to get localities past the idea they have complete control over where every site or cell needs to go. You can't have all the wireless broadband you want … and at the same time restricting how fast and the ability to place [infrastructure]. It's one or the other.”
O'Rielly pointed to such 5G experimentation as one unnamed major carrier looking at 5G deployment to compete with its own broadband network. "We have to be willing to use commission authority to push bad [local regulatory] actors out of the way," he said.
The scope of that 5G infrastructure will depend on how it's deployed, panelists said. With small cells seemingly having ranges of about 200 meters, that radius “is not good if you think you have to blanket the state of Maryland,” said FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Engineer Chris Helzer. But specific use cases would require a less-dense small cell infrastructure, he said.
The FCC also should be willing to use the accelerating dockets model it used in the 1990s to expedite wireline disputes, using a similar structure "to root out barriers to wireless sighting," O'Rielly said. He said the agency might want to consider having Wireless Bureau staff in the field to specifically address localities' sighting issues. And he criticized the FCC's special access regulatory approach, saying it is "the surest way" to slow the expansion of backhaul needed for 5G.
Deployment of 5G also could be stalled by "untested licensing regimes," like using the same 3.5 GHz sharing regime on the 37 GHz band, O'Rielly said. The 3.5 GHz sharing model generated concerns "that should give pause" before being adopted elsewhere, he said, adding that it would be "premature" to use that sharing model in high-frequency bands.
Whether there ultimately will be one 5G standard isn't clear. The rush to deploy carries with it business advantages of being first, Hunter said -- “we all want to be first” -- but it also raises the risk of fragmentation, as happened with 2G and the rival CDMA and GSM technologies. Mariam Sorond, Dish Network vice president-technology development, said fragmentation could happen regardless, even with standards bodies working on universal standards. “To get a whole industry to agree … is not easy,” she said. Sorond said that South Korea has an added motivator of deploying 5G before universal standards are developed “if they want to make the [2018 Winter] Olympics.”
Wireless carrier and satellite panelists said they foresee the two industries working out a sharing framework for 28 GHz, as the FCC is pursing as part of its spectrum frontiers rulemaking (see 1603090057). Hunter said sharing is difficult given the various classes of satellite incumbents, some more robust than others in different areas of the country. "We are left with these [multiple] unique cases," he said. Sorond said the sharing "will be very band specific, very operation specific. What works in 28 GHz won't necessarily be repeated everywhere." She also said Dish is trying to introduce 5G technology in satellites, which "is going to solve a lot of problems" when satellite and terrestrial networks have the same 5G interfaces, creating one seamless network.