12/5 Reply Comments Urging FCC to Reject Higher Power Limits in CBRS and to Promote Local Shared Use

New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) submitted comments urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to resist the push by some incumbents to remake the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band into a traditional band customized for specific purposes like mobile carrier 5G. To do so would be to take a step backward to the old days of “command and control” by effectively limiting use to a single business model through technical rules rather than explicit regulation.

Instead, the Commission should take this opportunity to adopt rules that enhance the qualities that make this band different and flexible. It should build on the qualities of this band that have enabled and encouraged hundreds of new users and use cases, not seek to customize the band for a handful of high-power licensees. Both diversity in spectrum access and more dynamic, intensive frameworks for sharing underutilized bands are crucial to the nation’s wireless future.

The record is clear that while some mobile industry commenters seek to fundamentally change the purpose of CBRS by authorizing very high-power use tailored to their business model, the vast majority of CBRS users strongly oppose higher power limits. This opposition is particularly clear among smaller and local users that rely on GAA spectrum and who have, according to NTIA, deployed by far the vast majority of CBSDs in reliance on the Commission’s 2018 rules. Opposition to substantially higher power and in-band OOBE limits is also clear among the hundreds of wireless ISPs that bring connectivity and competition to the fixed wireless market in rural and less densely populated areas. Opposition is also clear among the largest cable companies that are among the largest buyers of priority access licenses (PALs) and leveraging small-cell connectivity to bring needed competition to the mobile broadband market by leveraging the small-cell, local access that have been foundational to CBRS. The same is true for school districts, libraries, airports, college campuses, hospitals and other local users helping to narrow the digital divide.

The vast majority of CBRS users also agree that substantially higher power levels and higher in-band Out of Box Experience (OOBE) limits will induce a “tragedy of the commons.” More and more users turn up their power levels either to expand coverage or, more likely, to preemptively defend themselves against other General Authorized Access (GAA) users who have increased their power or could be expected to do so in the future. The resulting interference and reduced channel availability will be further exacerbated since the Navy and Department of Defense (DoD) will have little choice but to reverse the expanded access and certainty achieved this year with CBRS 2.0. This would significantly increase the size of the protection areas, the frequency of channel moves, and the resulting decrease in channel availability and throughput for GAA users in particular. wireless internet service providers (WISPs) and other GAA users that invested in reliance on the rules will be coerced to replace existing, relatively new equipment and purchase expensive high-powered base stations such as those used by mobile carriers—if they can afford it.

Parties that represent a large share of the users and competition facilitated by CBRS also agree that the Commission should reject the proposal to relax the -25 dBm/MHz CBRS in-band emissions limit to -13 dBm/MHz. As we stated in our comments with the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, it seems inevitable that this increase in-band will increase interference for CBRS operators that have deployed based on the existing technical rules.

Finally, concerning Citizens Broadband Radio Service Device (CBSD) information and reporting, our groups believe that both Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators and CBRS operators need additional information to enhance GAA coexistence and service quality. Much of this information is already available and should be transparent; the rest should be relatively easy to collect. The utility and efficiency of the band for GAA users could be increased enormously by allowing Spectrum Access Systems (SASs) to collect, use, and share with operators—and regulators—three types of information that are currently either obscured or not provided:

• First, there is strong support for allowing band users to know where nearby CBSDs are located, their technical characteristic, and what frequencies they have been granted to use (and, ideally, what channels they actually are using).
• Second, the SAS administrators should be allowed (and possibly required) to disclose the boundaries of Priority Access Licenses (PAL) Protection Areas to facilitate GAA-PAL coexistence.
• And third, CBSDs should be required to report their actual channel use back to the SAS, as well as possibly other readily-collected data about the interference environment.