3.5 GHz Exclusion Zones Still Too Big, Calabrese Says
NTIA’s proposed exclusion zones for the 3.5 GHz band remain overly conservative, even after being dialed down considerably, Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project, told us Thursday. NTIA recently filed at the FCC documents proposing…
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much smaller “exclusion zones” along the coast than previously for the band, targeted by the FCC for sharing and small cells (see 1503250062). “Since the original exclusion zones assumed transmissions 1,000 times more powerful, shrinking them is simple common sense,” Calabrese said. But even these smaller zones make the 3.5 GHz band less commercially viable, he said. “The Navy told us their primary interference concern is a cumulative rise in the noise floor, within sight of the coastline, which can occur only from widespread and dense deployment of the very low-power, Wi-Fi like devices FCC is authorizing,” he said. “ Because this will take years, and because the geolocation database system governing minute-to-minute access to the band can limit the number of devices authorized to transmit within sight of Navy radar, it’s likely that passive sensing tied to the database will be deployed long before the noise floor endangers naval radar. In short, these exclusion zones are unnecessary and unduly restrictive.” Calabrese is a longtime member of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee.