Administration Still Looking at All Options on Spectrum Policy, NTIA Chief Says
NTIA has made no big decisions on a spectrum strategy favoring federal incumbents or industry, Administrator David Redl said at a Telecommunications Industry Association event Thursday. More than anything, the agency is seeking balance, he said. Redl said it's looking closely at bidirectional sharing, in which federal agencies could also share commercial bands. Some in industry fear early signals are federal agencies largely won in their push for sharing versus exclusive-use licenses (see 1806200067).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
“We have a congressional prerogative to keep looking at clearing and relocation,” Redl told us. “That hasn’t changed for us. We’re going to continue to follow the law. But we’ve taken a very conscious approach to say we think we should have as many tools as possible to get as much as we can out of this spectrum resource.” The directive from Congress and the White House is clear, he said: “Make 5G available in America.” The "administration is committed to doing all it can to help put America in the lead on 5G, and a big part of that will be focusing on ways for the government to find more spectrum for commercial services, and to facilitate infrastructure investment,” Redl told TIA.
Bidirectional sharing was pushed into the limelight as part of the Mobile Now law, which mandated an FCC study, to be completed with NTIA support. “We are currently in the process of reaching out to the federal agencies to establish potential sharing scenarios of interest” and working with the commission on a work plan, Redl said. “As we move down a path to viable shared access, we will have to find ways to provide the regulatory certainty that commercial spectrum users and federal entities need to make longer-term investment decisions.”
“It’s early,” Redl said of bidirectional sharing after the speech. “We’re just starting to do our outreach within the federal government to see what kind of interest there is among the agencies, what kind of ideas they have.” The FCC will do outreach, too, he said: His agency needs to hear from everyone to “make good decisions.”
NTIA is also focused on spectrum leasing, as proposed in the administration’s FY 2019 budget, Redl said in the speech. “This could be another means of affording federal agencies some increased flexibility in rationalizing their spectrum use,” Redl said. “Essentially, NTIA would work with the agencies to identify spectrum assignments or bands with ‘white spaces’ geographically or in the time or frequency domains.”
The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee may play a role on new spectrum initiatives, though it's in process of being reconstituted, Redl told us. “We’re looking at every tool we’ve got,” he said. “We’re also on a shot clock. Congress gave us a deadline.”
None of the decisions to come will be easy, Redl said. "Our plan for the future is based on acknowledgement that the days of redeploying spectrum from one use to another are over for the most part," he said. "There are no more easy and relatively painless relocations we can do." NTIA posted his remarks.
“5G is less about the data demand that is increasingly growing and trying to keep pace with consumer demand,” Mary Brown, Cisco senior director-government affairs, told the event. “It’s far more about introducing a set of very flexible, highly security technologies, which are going to be the future of networking.” While 5G will enable lots of uses, “it also will enable new kinds of competition,” she said. The basic story on wireless demand is easy to tell, Brown said. “Growth continues.”
Spectrum is one of the few big things in Washington that’s not partisan, said Dean Brenner, Qualcomm senior vice president-government affairs. “There isn’t a Democratic 5G or a Republican 5G.” Speeds are already increasing with 4G, Brenner said. “No one has ever bought a phone with 4G and said, ‘You know I’d rather have 3G, I don’t want something that fast.’”