FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel wants the industry to throw away ‘the tired notion that we face a choice between licensed and unlicensed spectrum’. The major operators may defend the value of their expensively bought frequencies to the hilt, but the world is moving towards more flexible approaches, and the FCC is becoming increasingly willing to embrace that, rather than protecting narrow cellco interests.
Addressing a conference called Moving Wi-Fi Forward, Rosenworcel said that ‘good spectrum policy requires both’ types of spectrum, and denied that Wi-Fi’s success had been at the expense of ‘others who wish to use the airwaves’. Recent FCC policies to open up more capacity for Wi-Fi, to support spectrum sharing in government bands, and to enable the use of white spaces in broadcast bands for wireless broadband, all indicate that there is some substance behind such grand talk.
Roseworcel went further, saying the regulator was working on a whole “new game plan” for unlicensed spectrum from low to high frequencies. ‘More unlicensed spectrum means more Wi-Fi,’ she said, and the next new source may come with the 600MHz incentive auction next year, which will see some broadcasters’ frequencies in this band repurposed for mobile broadband.
The commissioner said the FCC must be creative about finding room for unlicensed access in 600MHz while protecting incumbent services from interference. Possible solutions include an expanded duplex gap (10MHz guard bands and 11MHz duplex gap), moving unlicensed microphones to their own locations, and opening up more unlicensed space in Channel 37. Opponents of this last idea cite risks of interference to existing services, especially wireless medical telemetry.
These were some of the options proposed last week when three leading companies in the fight for unlicensed 600MHz capacity – Microsoft, Google and Broadcom ‘ held a meeting with the FCC to argue the case. Google had previously petitioned the regulator to allocate four 6MHz channels in the band for unlicensed use, so that some ‘beachfront property’ could become ‘public beaches’.
‘If we do this right, we can increase the value of licensed spectrum without diminishing the number of licenses we sell at auction,’ Rosenworcel said. At the conference, she also discussed the FCC’s recent vote to expand flexible rules in the 5.150GHz-5.250GHz space, increasing unlicensed bandwidth at 5GHz. She said this could be boosted further if the 5.350GHz-5.470GHz frequencies were also made available for licence-exempt use, by emulating the exclusion zone policies currently being developed for 3.5 GHz.