Bilateral Sharing Pushed by Administration, but Expected To Prove Controversial

CSMAC member Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a former FCC commissioner, during last week’s CSMAC meeting urged caution: “Licensees, particularly those that have paid a lot of money for licenses, may have some concern about federal agencies raising questions about federal access to spectrum in which they assume they have gotten some degree of exclusivity.”

Wireless industry officials told us bidirectional sharing could take several forms. For example, DOD has legacy systems that still can operate on the AWS-1 and AWS-3 spectrum formerly used by the government and may be able to use the spectrum in remote areas, officials said. DOD also does a lot of work with electronic warfare, blocking communications in bands used by mobile phones, and could test its systems in remote areas, officials said. They said improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are sometimes set off by cellphones, which is a related area of inquiry.

DOD has also emphasized the importance of making its equipment more frequency agile, industry officials said. The department is looking at using LTE for its field communications and deployable networks and will want to test deployments in the U.S. NTIA officials said at last week’s CSMAC meeting that they plan to provide use cases for a subcommittee as it explores bilateral sharing.

“We are supportive of sharing, but you’ve got to get the conditions right around it,” said a wireless carrier executive who has worked on the issue. The key is finding a way DOD and other parts of the government can have access to commercial spectrum “in a meaningful way,” without having a negative impact on licensed use of the spectrum. “There’s a lot that needs to happen,” the executive said, saying government agencies and carriers already work together: “It just all depends on the use cases.”

“As our world grows increasingly mobile, it is important to have a path for meeting consumer, commercial and public sector demands,” said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs. “We welcome conversations about how to achieve all of these goals while making the most efficient use of limited spectrum resources.”

“There is no reason why bidirectional sharing will not become the new normal on at least an opportunistic, short-term basis,” said Michael Calabrese, CSMAC member and director of the Wireless Future Project at New America's Open Technology Institute. The FCC recently approved “use-it-or-share-it rules allowing opportunistic, unlicensed use of licensed bands when and where the licensee is not actually operating,” Calabrese said. “DOD and other federal agencies should be able to do the same, especially in places like remote military bases where it is not economical for licensed operators to provide service. The CSMAC has just formed a subcommittee to recommend exactly how this can be implemented in a manner that makes spectrum band sharing a win-win for the federal and private sectors alike.”

Bidirectional sharing is likely to become more common, Calabrese said. “Technologies are also being developed that should enable sharing unused bandwidth even when incumbent systems are in operation, provided that the secondary user, whether DOD or a private operator in a federal band, causes no harmful interference,” he said.

“I think people are realizing that bilateral sharing is a net positive for everyone and not some sort of effort to steal spectrum,” said Harold Feld, CSMAC member and senior vice president of Public Knowledge. “This is exactly what the 3.5 GHz band is about, although people only just now seem to be realizing it. The whole point of 3.5 GHz is to find a way for fed users to have priority and allow non-fed users to have access in a non-interfering basis.” The commission approved an order creating the new citizens broadband radio service in the 3550-3700 MHz band at its April meeting (see 1504170055).

Carriers appear to be broadening their view on how bidirectional sharing would work, Feld said. “You cannot realistically expect federal agencies to meet their needs by subscribing to commercial services,” he said. “The Secret Service is not going to rely on iPhones to talk to agents in the field. At the same time, carriers recognize that the only way to get more spectrum for auction is to find a way to accommodate these kinds of federal users.” Federal users like the Secret Service would use only a small percentage of the spectrum capacity that might be freed for use given bilateral sharing, he said. “More importantly, it's really the only way to get spectrum in the pipeline," he said. "As the technology for sharing spectrum continues to improve, and as the need for spectrum by non-federal and federal users continues to grow, it becomes increasingly obvious to everyone that bilateral sharing is going to happen.”

'Easier Said Than Done'

Other industry officials are skeptical.

Bilateral sharing “is easier said than done because the government’s periods of high demand correspond with the public’s demand peaks,” said Richard Bennett, network engineer and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Sharing works best when the spectrum has a single manager who can mediate access to the spectrum in real time, but the administration’s spectrum policy experts want an entirely different system based in continuous contention. The best way to share spectrum in the real world is for government users to become MVNOs [mobile virtual network operators] on commercially managed systems. After all the alternative approaches fail, this is where we’ll end up.”

Doug Brake, telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, questioned whether bilateral sharing will be commonplace anytime soon. “The desire to see bidirectional sharing comes from a legitimate need for more access to spectrum on the part of both federal and non-federal users," he said. “In some scenarios it certainly would make sense, for example, if the Department of Defense relinquished a sizable band, but wanted to maintain access for training exercises a few days out of the year in select, rural areas. There are many other scenarios where it might make sense. But I worry discussions of bidirectional sharing have become more of a foot-dragging excuse to put off that first step of relinquishment.”

Bilateral and other new forms of sharing between federal and nonfederal spectrum users “deserves exploration,” said Fred Campbell, executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology. “Improved sharing strategies could promote more intensive spectrum use, but that’s unlikely in the near term.” Campbell warned of economic, technical and legal barriers that need to be resolved for significant sharing to occur. “These barriers include transaction costs related to agency negotiations, potential innovation penalties related to sunk federal investment and the ongoing potential for harmful interference, and legal restraints on agency activities,” he said.

“The term ‘spectrum sharing’ can take ​many forms and can be a catch-all phrase for new ideas that could include everything but the traditional notion of exclusive use licenses,” said Robert McDowell, a former FCC commissioner now at Wiley Rein. “As the debate over nuances regarding what kind of bilateral spectrum sharing would work best continues, however, the real answer to America's spectrum shortage lies in policies that would create abundance." Congress could require that unused federal spectrum is auctioned, he said. "That's still possible during this Congress."