Industry Officials Say FCC Has More Work to Do on Wireless Infrastructure Rules

The first thing the FCC needs to do is win in court on challenges to the two infrastructure orders, said Austin Bonner of Harris Wiltshire. “The FCC is not writing on a blank slate … there are previous decisions.” The FCC still has room to provide more clarity, she said. “One thing the FCC could do is try to find ways to provide more certainty about things that are in the infrastructure order,” Bonner said. “There are open questions about what constitutes, for example, a reasonable consulting expense. I think there are going to be little skirmishes about those expenses, how they get calculated.”

John Nakahata, also of Harris Wiltshire, said the FCC could help. “Any time you get into interpreting … and applying the rules, you’re going to have questions around what does this actually mean,” he said. “That’s going to be either being decided by the commission or decided by the courts in case-by-case adjudication.” Courts can provide very narrow guidance, but adjudication is “slow and messy and it costs a lot,” Nakahata said.

“I’m sure there will be lots of attempts at the local level to work around the [rules] or to find loopholes,” said Steve Sharkey, T-Mobile vice president-government affairs. “It’s going to be an evolving situation, but the commission has taken big swipes at this and done a great job in moving the ball forward.” On 5G, Sharkey noted things are getting started: “We don’t know how things are going to develop.”

Paul Challoner, Ericsson North America vice president-network product solutions, said the FCC may need to do more work on provisions allowing local government to hold up proposed projects for aesthetic reasons. “Now, the municipalities have discretion to define an aesthetic standard,” he said. “How onerous is that going to be? … I think we’re going to need some harmonization.” Equipment makers could have to manufacture equipment to satisfy tens of thousands of different municipalities, he said. “That could be a problem.”

Adams said provisions on aesthetics were added in final negotiations on the order and provide only that they have to be “objective, reasonable, nondiscriminatory and published in advance. It’s a pretty light-touch regulation” and came as a result of discussions with local officials.

“We can’t determine from Washington aesthetics, which seem to be particularly localized and fact-specific,” Adams said. “Is that messy?” The FCC just provided clarity, he said. “You’re certainly going to be in no worse position than you were before.” Adams said the agency puts only “guardrails” around issues like aesthetics.

The U.S. will have to build even more small cells than the 800,000 envisioned by the FCC to make 5G work, Challoner said. “The challenge is how to build those small cellsites fast enough,” he said. “Industry has really struggled to get the velocity of small-cell deployment up. We’ve moved from tens to hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of sites.” Now, hundreds of thousands are needed, he said.

Not having 5G in the U.S. because of zoning red tape would be “a crime,” Challoner said. “We’re glad it’s being addressed.” Challoner expects small carriers to deploy in the high-band ranges, but across smaller parts of their service territories. “I think there will be multiple opportunities to dip into that millimeter wave and to be successful,” he said.

Sharkey said there are no guarantees the U.S. will win the race to 5G. “I don’t think it’s certain at all,” he said. “We’ve got tremendous resources deploying 5G … but I do think we’ve got a lot of work to do.” The core spectrum for 5G is midband “and we’re behind there,” he said. “You’ve got countries like China and Korea that are very focused on an industrial policy of getting out ahead.”

Some suggest it could take 27 quarters for 5G to overtake 4G, Bonner said. “That’s a long time in technology development; it’s not that long in policy development. Many of these issues are going to take years to sort out.”

Jason Hill, managing partner at MVP Capital, said this is an important time for tower and other infrastructure companies. “A lot of the concerns we hear from capital markets around funding tower companies or funding small-cell build outs is it’s just going to take forever,” Hill said. That’s changing with the revised rules, he said. “We have conversations weekly, if not daily, with new sources of capital interested in funding opportunities.”

Bonner is excited about 5G as a consumer. “I’ve rebuilt my home IoT network so many times that my husband no longer knows how to turn off the lights in the backyard,” she said.