Howard Buskirk

FCC Commissioners Nathan Simington and Geoffrey Starks warned the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas that the FCC’s loss of general spectrum auction authority last year is hampering U.S. competitive efforts against major rivals in the 6G race. CTIA President Meredith Baker sounded a similar theme at the beginning of the conference, which CTIA sponsors with GSMA (see 2410080044).

Industry officials continued questioning AT&T’s Wednesday proposal that calls for major changes in how 3 GHz, including the citizens broadband radio service band, is configured (see 2410090037). Monisha Ghosh, University of Notre Dame engineering professor and former FCC chief technologist, said AT&T's proposal leaves some questions unanswered. While in principle it’s “desirable to have high-power and low-power users separated by one boundary, the AT&T proposal doesn’t address how the existing Navy radars in the CBRS band will be protected” or “relocated and how spectrum sharing in 3.1-3.45 GHz will be implemented,” Ghosh told us, noting there are now 120 different kinds of radar in the band. Ghosh warned against drawing conclusions before the administration completes its study of the lower 3 GHz band called for in the national spectrum strategy. Moreover, Ghosh disagreed with AT&T that CBRS is "underutilized.” Relocating CBRS devices into another band that’s not an existing 3rd Generation Partnership Project band wouldn’t be a “trivial” problem, she said. Meanwhile, Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld wrote in an email, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and when you’re a carrier “everything looks like it should be optimized for mobile broadband.” Feld added, “CBRS was designed to permit new kinds of innovation by different actors, such as stadiums, large warehouses, ports, or enterprise customers looking to run their own private networks.”

The FCC and the U.S. government on Wednesday asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court to hold in abeyance a challenge of the agency's Oct. 25 declaratory ruling authorizing E-rate funding for Wi-Fi on school buses (see 2312200040), pending a U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case. That SCOTUS case, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas, examines whether the Hobbs Act permits a “party aggrieved” by an agency’s “final order” to seek review in a federal court of appeals and “allows nonparties to obtain review of claims asserting that an agency order exceeds the agency’s statutory authority.” The appeal is of another case by the 5th Circuit. Maurine and Matthew Molak, concerned about unsupervised access of students to social media, brought the school bus case. Their son died by suicide at 16 after he was cyberbullied. The FCC disputed whether the Molaks had legal standing to appeal the order because they didn't participate in the FCC proceeding (see 2406040024). “The Supreme Court’s decision” in the NRC case “may invalidate petitioners’ sole basis for asserting that this Court can review their petition, and require this Court to grant respondents’ pending motion to dismiss,” the FCC said in the Wednesday filing: “To avoid a potentially needless expenditure of judicial and litigation resources, this Court should grant the requested abeyance.” The FCC noted the Molaks' argument that they had standing was predicated on the 5th Circuit’s holding in the case before SCOTUS: Should the high court conclude "that the Hobbs Act does not allow nonparties to obtain review of claims asserting that an agency order exceeds the agency’s statutory authority, petitioners will have no basis for seeking judicial review under the Hobbs Act, and this Court must grant the Commission’s pending motion to dismiss.” Oral argument in the school bus case is scheduled for Nov. 4 (see 2409260046). The Molaks, meanwhile, asked the FCC not to include Wi-Fi gear for off-premise or school bus use in its FY 2025 list of eligible services under the E-rate program. “Subsidizing off-premises use of Wi-Fi hotspots means facilitating unsupervised social media access by children and teenagers, which means enabling the very sort of destructive behavior that we all should strive to prevent,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 13-184.

AT&T on Wednesday called for major changes in how 3 GHz, including the citizens broadband radio service band, is configured, going beyond what the FCC proposed in an August NPRM (see 2408160031). Meanwhile, during a Broadband Breakfast webinar Wednesday, experts said the CBRS band has demonstrated the value and importance of spectrum sharing.

NTIA remains “on track” to deliver on initial commitments under the national spectrum strategy that the Biden administration released in November (see 2311130048), NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson said at the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas. Davidson also defended the administration’s progress under the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program, a recurring target of Republican criticism (see 2409270032).

T-Mobile sees limited potential for dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) in carrier networks, Egil Gronstad, senior director-technology development and strategy, said Tuesday. During an Ookla webinar, Gronstad said T-Mobile views its early move to launch a 5G stand-alone (SA) network as critical. It examined DSS and found the efficiency is “pretty bad,” he said. DSS has been “hyped a lot … and we also had high hopes for it.” T-Mobile decided “very early on” that it wanted to make a “quick pivot to SA.” He added, “We drove the chipset and ecosystem very hard from the very beginning to support SA.” Almost all the devices on T-Mobile’s network are SA-capable. That has allowed the carrier to “quickly refarm spectrum from LTE to 5G." Gronstad thought T-Mobile’s major competitors would have done more to move to SA by now. T-Mobile has also worked hard on voice-over new radio (NR), which is voice on a 5G network. “Voice-over NR was a fairly large undertaking -- almost as large as voice-over LTE back in the day.” Vendors tell T-Mobile “just a handful” of operators are moving to voice-over NR globally “and we are five years into the 5G journey,” Gronstad said. “There is a lot more to be done still.” T-Mobile considers high-band spectrum for 5G a “failure.” The carrier didn’t fall “for this millimeter-wave trap,” which was “mostly set up by academia.” Verizon “took the bait and banked on millimeter-wave.” Gronstad also underscored the importance of handset makers enabling the use of new technology in their phones. The pro versions of Apple’s new iPhone 16 support power class 1.5 and uplink multiple-input and multiple-output, “which was music to my ears,” he said. “We have been working so hard to try to get the flagship handset vendors to support this.” Those additions will improve coverage capacity and throughput, he said.

CTIA President Meredith Baker warned Tuesday that the U.S. will fall behind other countries unless Congress restores FCC auction authority, in remarks to the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas. Baker quoted Paul Milgram, the economist whose work led to the first spectrum auction. The loss of auction authority is “nuts,” she said. The agency’s auction authority lapsed in March 2023 (see 2303100084).

The Heritage Foundation argued the FCC should abandon rules that let schools and libraries use E-rate support for off-premises Wi-Fi hot spots and wireless internet services. Its position was made in comments on a Further NPRM. Commissioners approved the FNPRM 3-2 in July (see 2407180024). Other commenters supported the order, urging tweaks that could make the program more effective. Comments were due Friday, with most posted Monday in docket 21-31.

The U.S. Supreme Court will take up early in its new term whether reimbursement requests submitted to the Universal Service Administrative Co.-administered E-rate program are “claims” under the False Claims Act (FCA). On Nov. 4, justices will hear Wisconsin Bell v. U.S., a case from the 7th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court (see 2405220039).

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel circulated on Friday for a commissioner vote rules that would expand parts of the 6 GHz band where new very-low power (VLP) devices can operate without coordination, beyond the initial 850 MHz commissioners approved last year (see 2310190054). When the FCC took comment earlier this year, Wi-Fi advocates and 6 GHz incumbents disagreed sharply on whether to expand VLP use of the band (see 2404290035).