The threat to networks is real, Clete Johnson, of Wilkinson Barker, said at a Silicon Flatirons spectrum conference Thursday. The threat comes from intelligence services and their agents in countries including North Korea, China, Iran and Russia, he said. There are “tens of thousands of people” who “go to school, go to work, they provide for their families, they find fulfillment in their daily life by trying to figure out how to get into our networks and devices,” Johnson said. “It’s their job. So it’s not some abstraction. It’s a concrete set of forces who are out there working on this every day.” The more everything is connected “everything is vulnerable” and 5G will pose new threats, he said. The government and industry need to work together, Johnson said: “If everything is connected, then all of the solutions need to be connected.” Monisha Ghosh, engineering professor at the University of Chicago and program director at the National Science Foundation, said the U.S. is researching the security threat. “A lot of the news items that you see of threats being discovered or solutions being proposed are coming from the academic community,” she said: “We need to get that community much better connected to industry as well as federal agencies.” Ghosh said “funding is never adequate” and the joke is “NSF stands for not sufficient funds.” Some of the threats will be revealed only as networks launch, she said. “5G is going to roll out as a production system,” she said: “It’s not being experimented with at the scale at which it’s going to roll out. When it rolls out is when you’re going to find the holes.” Rebecca Dorch, senior spectrum policy analyst at the NTIA Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, oversaw testing of systems in the new 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band. Researchers did their best to identify the unknowns, she said. “My nightmare scenario is, notwithstanding all of the careful analysis, … something unexpected or unanticipated could occur within that entire ecosystem that could actually cause harmful interference,” she said. Dynamic spectrum sharing in general poses risks, Dorch said. “Sharing between very, very different types of communications systems, as that increases, and the density of those devices and systems … that’s where I think that we really haven’t fully tacked for potential for interference at the RF level,” she said: “We’ve got some real vulnerabilities potentially there.” Johnson recalled the financial crisis of 2008, where problems in the subprime mortgage market in the United States developed into a full-blown international banking crisis. “You had a problem in one place that cascaded and took over the entire economy,” Johnson said: “My nightmare is as the speed of innovation increases, or the rate of innovation increases, and we deploy billions and billions of devices” it connects people and companies “that may not be aware or where their data sits or how it can be corrupted or manipulated.” We need to test networks, but we don’t know what the “bugs are” until 5G rolls out on a mass scale, he said. Cooperation is crucial, Johnson said: “We’re all part of this increasingly symbiotic relationship and we don’t know exactly what the effects of that are going to be when something goes wrong.”

T-Mobile/Sprint opponents in California protested an amended joint application filed last month (see 1909200033). It lacks detail on new elements, preventing the California Public Utilities Commission from ensuring it will be in consumers' interest, said the CPUC Public Advocates Office, Communications Workers of America, The Utility Reform Network and Greenlining Institute in docket A.18-07-011 Wednesday. “The Amended Application contains limited or incomplete information and does not fully explain the effect of the Asset Purchase Agreement on California-specific commitments.” A preconference hearing was to have occurred Thursday (see 1909260046). T-Mobile and Sprint didn’t comment.

A USTelecom executive and a former FCC adviser debated net neutrality and a recent decision from the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court on The Communicators scheduled to be televised this weekend on C-SPAN and available online Friday. Patrick Halley, USTelecom senior vice president-advocacy and regulatory, and Gigi Sohn, a former aide to then-Chairman Tom Wheeler, discussed Chevron, Brand X, state vs. federal jurisdiction over broadband, and other details. Halley noted that the court ruled the FCC was within its discretion to regulate broadband as an information service, and while the court said the FCC can't expressly pre-empt state laws on the matter, "it would be an over-reach to say states can write their own laws," especially as much of internet use is interstate, not intrastate. Sohn suggested the FCC has abdicated its authority to regulate the broadband market: "The court was really clear: If an agency lacks authority, it can't then tell a state it can't regulate." Sohn was not suggesting states would have an easy time, but nor will industry, in determining when states can regulate over issues of net neutrality: "It will be case by case. It won't be a slam dunk." With the recent court decision, states will test the boundaries, she said, "and to me that argues for a federal law." Halley "completely" agreed with the need for a federal law, and said the sides likely agree on the concept of net neutrality as well. "The best answer for all of this is a federal, modern national framework that provides the net neutrality protection" that most consumers and businesses want. When it comes to one of the issues that the court remanded to the FCC, on how it will regulate broadband in the USF Lifeline program, the court said only that the agency did not sufficiently address the matter in its arguments, Halley said, not that it lacks such authority. Last week, the court upheld most of a 2017 FCC net neutrality repeal but remanded several matters to the FCC for clarification (see 1910010018).

Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, told a Silicon Flatirons conference Thursday that protections against spectrum vulnerability have to be built into design. People have to recognize that “because they’re using the airwaves at times, they may be vulnerable to interference,” he said at the conference streamed from Boulder, Colorado. Device and network flexibility is important, Knapp said. Most cellphones contain more than a dozen radio transmitters, he said: “They’re capable of operating in different modes … making trade-offs for the signals not getting through.” Challenges will get harder, Knapp said. “The downside is if you’re looking at spectrum vulnerabilities, there are lots of bands to be concerned about,” he said. “We’ve got a lot more things out there that are relying on the airwaves.” Every device generates “some spurious noise and contributes to the soup,” he said. Managing spectrum isn’t easy, he said. “We’re always trying to put new things on airwaves and allow for innovation for the new applications that you see coming out every day,” Knapp said: “For the incumbents, what they care about is it’s not going to disrupt the services.” The question becomes what data do you collect on interference, Knapp said. “If you’ve got a phone and its throughput is reduced because of the noise level, how would you know?” he asked. “There’s immediately privacy concerns when you start collecting this kind of data.” It’s difficult for FCC engineers to gauge whether data is reliable and figure out how to interpret and analyze it, he said. “I know don’t if there are easy answers there,” he said. It’s important “to anticipate every way some 12-year-old who is up to no good has figured out a way to undo all your protections,” he said. We’re trying to replace wires with wireless, Knapp said. He said 5G will “greatly expand the use cases … coming for connectivity.” Enforcement actions help but are complex, Knapp said. “These aren’t like parking tickets,” he said. The Enforcement Bureau has to do the investigation, then “build a case” against violators, he said. The FCC is focused on jammers and goes after them, he said: “It’s tough because of all the different ways that people can find to get them out there.” Everybody "has a piece of this, everybody plays a role” on security, Knapp said: “There are so many different agencies that are involved in trying deal with the cyber issues and the kinds of things we’re talking about today.” Network operators, equipment designers, standards organizations and app developers all have responsibilities, he said: Don’t “think about this afterwards because then it becomes a big problem and very expensive to fix,” he said: Danger comes when people think that “'I’m following the security standard, what could possibly happen?'” Wireless devices pose a special problem, said Pierre de Vries, co-director of the Spectrum Policy Initiative at Silicon Flatirons. For wireless devices to work, “they have to be open to the world because if your radio can’t hear anything, it doesn’t operate,” he said: “They don’t have the refuge of hiding behind the wire or fiber.” The question is: “How do you secure something that everybody has access to,” de Vries said.

The Supreme Court again delayed considering an appeal of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that VoIP is an information service exempt from state regulation. Minnesota and Charter Communications disagreed, in letters posted Wednesday, about the meaning of last week’s net neutrality decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The high court gave no new date Wednesday as it rescheduled the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission appeal of the decision supporting Charter in the case about state VoIP regulation (18-1386). The PUC’s writ petition was scheduled to be heard at a Friday conference (see 1910070034). The PUC wrote the Supreme Court last week about the D.C. Circuit decision that the FCC couldn’t pre-empt state net neutrality policies (see 1910010018). Dissenter Judge Stephen Williams “explained how the majority’s holdings created a conflict with the Eight Circuit,” the Minnesota agency said. The appeals court said any state regulation of information service conflicts with the FCC’s nonregulation policy, but Williams said this “approach to preemption ‘seems wholly incompatible with the majority’s idea that there is no Commission preemptive authority vis-à-vis [an information] service,’” the PUC said. Charter responded Monday that the D.C. Circuit’s holding “does not create the circuit split with the Eighth Circuit that Petitioners claim.” The court “took pains to emphasize that it was not opining on whether conflict preemption might likewise displace state broadband regulation, and that it was not ‘mak[ing] a conflict preemption assessment in this case …,’ instead declining to consider the issue as not properly presented in light of the specific FCC order under review and the Commission’s defense of the order on appeal.”

T-Mobile has peeled Mississippi from states’ lawsuit against the carrier buying Sprint. Attorney General Jim Hood (D) said he reached agreement with T-Mobile to make Mississippi-specific commitments. T-Mobile agreed to deploy 5G to at least 62 percent of the state’s general and rural populations, with speeds of 100 Mbps or more, said Hood’s office. “The parties also made limited price commitments and … vowed to decrease prices as supply increased, particularly as DISH enters the mobile market.” Hood “confirmed that there would be no retail job loss and that new stores would be opened in rural areas,” his office said. T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted applause. Last month, Illinois joined what's now 16 AGs suing the carriers at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (see 1909030060), while Arkansas joined 11 other states supporting the deal (see 1909100052). Florida settled claims earlier this month (see 1910020025). "With every passing day, we continue to build a strong case that this mega-merger is bad for innovation, bad for workers, and bad for consumers," responded a spokesperson for New York AG Letitia James (D), leading the lawsuit. "And we look forward to presenting these arguments in court."

The FCC should take up the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directive to collect diversity data and “redouble” equal employment opportunity efforts, Commissioner Geoffrey Starks told the Media Institute at the group’s Free Speech America Gala Monday night. African-American owned TV stations -- 12 -- is such a small portion of the 1,300 total U.S. TV stations that it’s closer to zero percent than one, Starks said, making similar points to those he struck last week at the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters (see 1910030059). “No longer can it rely on bad data and analysis while ignoring its obligations,” Starks said of the commission. “Given the historic problems we’ve had with broadcast diversity, new research like disparity studies identifying past discrimination in licensing could be critical.” The FCC can design programs based on race, ethnicity and gender “so long as we are careful and provide a well-supported reason,” Starks said.

Despite FCC opposition, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted local governments’ request to expedite oral argument on the various challenges of the commission’s wireless infrastructure orders (see 1910040016). “The Clerk shall calendar these petitions as soon as practicable,” the court wrote in a Monday order (in Pacer). It referred the localities’ other request to split the case into two oral arguments to the assigned panel. “This case is being considered for an upcoming oral argument calendar in Pasadena,” said a separate entry Monday in docket 19-70123. The court asked parties to consider February and two subsequent sitting months in its schedule. The FCC didn’t comment Tuesday.

New York asked the FCC to delay the Oct. 23 hard launch of the national verifier in that state. “It would very likely cause otherwise eligible low-income consumers to be denied Lifeline benefits during this transitional period,” the Public Service Commission petitioned Monday in docket 11-42. “Real hardship could be imposed on low-income New Yorkers.” A big problem is Universal Service Administrative Co. can’t yet access state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid databases, the PSC said. The FCC’s recent announcement of national Medicaid database (see 1909180026) access is “laudable,” but “we estimate that this new verification process has the potential to assist with the automated verification of up to at most 60 percent of the Lifeline eligible population,” the PSC said. New York agencies are “working diligently with USAC” to set up an application programming interface connection for verifying state SNAP recipients, but the “process of establishing a data agreement and API connection with New York is both technically and legally complicated,” the PSC said. The commission cited NARUC’s July resolution recommending suspension of the hard rollout (see 1907240043). The FCC declined comment.

Six days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled partly for the FCC (see 1910010018), President Donald Trump tweeted that "we just WON the big court case on Net Neutrality Rules! Will lead to many big things, including 5G. Congratulations to the FCC and its Chairman, Ajit Pai." Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel responded: "This is wrong. The court told the FCC it couldn't stop states from making their own #NetNeutrality rules. It also sent a bunch of issues back to the FCC." Many want Congress to step in (see 1910010044).