Verizon Starting Spectrum Sharing Tests at Five DOD Sites
Verizon Wireless is starting tests -- in cooperation with the Defense Department -- at five undisclosed military installations aimed at gathering baseline information on sharing of government spectrum with commercial users, a Verizon official said Wednesday at the Americas Spectrum Management Conference. Verizon in May pledged to spend $5 million on sharing tests. Meanwhile, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said the FCC is moving forward on various orders promoting sharing, though many questions remain.
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Working with DOD, Verizon is setting up monitoring equipment, including spectrum analyzers, at the sites for tests being run by two contractors, Comsearch and NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences in Boulder, Colo., said Patrick Welsh, a Verizon assistant vice president who spoke at the conference. Verizon will gather data over “many months,” to get a more accurate picture of federal spectrum use at the five sites, including how it’s being used, the intensity of the use and the system characteristics, Welsh told us.
Tests will take into account the main ways DOD uses spectrum, including aeronautical mobile telemetry operations, aeronautical fixed uses, unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite operations, Welsh said. The data will be used in computer simulation models, but field tests are also possible, Welsh said. Verizon will spend some of the $5 million on the tests already underway, he said. “We're also going to take a look at some of the longer-term opportunities, moving away from static sharing to more dynamic sharing,” Welsh said.
The FCC approved special temporary authority for T-Mobile to also do sharing tests, Knapp said. “The initial testing is going to focus on monitoring to get a better understanding of the occupancy, and then, later on, assuming we have identified a way to share, will actually conduct tests to make sure that the practice matches with the theory,” he said.
Sharing may work, in part, because carrier networks are built to adapt, Knapp said. LTE is “designed to tolerate some interference,” he said. In the “early days of wireless when you had one band … if that band went down there was no service,” he said. “Today, almost all of the carriers are using multiple bands … if you have a situation where you're losing some capacity in one band you can still pick it up in other places.” Knapp said carriers likely would support some forms of dynamic sharing, despite objections voiced by CTIA and others (CD June 25 p1).
"One of the difficulties is people have different understandings of what dynamic spectrum access is,” Knapp said. “If the dynamic spectrum access that we're talking about is once a week for 10 minutes a radar comes on in part of my spectrum and I have to work around it and I can cope with it, those are the kinds of decisions that are being explored. … Ideally, everybody would love to have clean spectrum all of the time."
The FCC is not backing down from warnings about a potential spectrum “crunch,” Knapp said. “There’s generally been a strong consensus on the spectrum crunch,” he said. “I know that often people say, ‘Well, we're not so sure about that,’ and then you look and they've got two smartphones, two pads, and connected homes with a dozen devices.” The FCC is also working on various spectrum sharing proposals as laid out in a controversial report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (CD July 23 p1), he said. “We are planning action to take the ideas and advance them in at least part of the spectrum,” he said.
Spectrum sharing isn’t new, said NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia. “It’s going on day in and day out,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily catch the public eye so much, but it’s always going on.” The federal government “shares spectrum every day and we don’t share it in the nice, homogenous packages that we often think about as how spectrum is divided up,” he said. “We invite you to come join us in that enjoyable sharing environment."
The government needs prime spectrum for the same reasons everyone does, Nebbia said. “We talk about, ‘We're mobile,’ Well a Mach 2 aircraft is much more mobile than I'm ever going to be. DOD and other government agencies need mobile also. They need through-wall penetration.”