The CBRS Alliance is keen to put on a big show of progress at Mobile World Congress later this month, after its schedules were set back for a while by the US government shutdown. No date has yet been set to auction rights to the licensed portion of the USA’s three-tiered CBRS spectrum scheme, but the Alliance expects to see initial commercial deployments in the unlicensed tier during the second quarter of this year, and full commercial services in Q3. The CBRS scheme applies to the 3.5 GHz band and relies on spectrum access systems (SAS) to assign channels to devices in order of priority. There is guaranteed access for the top tier – federal incumbents; next priority goes to…