GE, Stanford Economist Make Case for Census-Tract Licensing in the 3.5 GHz Band
The FCC got feedback from General Electric that some in industry want small, census-tract sized licenses in the shared 3.5 GHz band. GE filed in docket 12-354 as the FCC sought comment on proposed changes filed by CTIA and T-Mobile…
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(see 1708090058). A big issue is size of priority access licenses (PALs) the FCC will offer. “GE is currently developing a suite of fixed point-to-point networks involving applications such as utility substation automation, positive traction control for trains, oil and gas pipeline monitoring, smart metering, wastewater management, heavy mining, and other forms of IoT and machine-to-machine telemetry,” the company said. “These use cases rely on the unique propagation characteristics of 3.5 GHz spectrum, which travels further and withstands more interference than high-band millimeter wave spectrum, but has sufficient bandwidth available to support higher throughput compared to more limited low-band frequencies.” An initial order said census-tract licensing “is ideally suited to geographically targeted applications, such as those in oil refineries, coal mines, shipyards, and construction sites,” GE said. Those types of deployments would be impractical if the FCC uses partial economic area licenses as proposed by CTIA and T-Mobile, it said. Paul Milgrom, auction expert and Stanford University economist, assured the FCC it could auction census-tract sized licenses given current technology. “There is clear real-world evidence that it is possible to conduct very many simple auctions on a single platform in a short period of time,” he wrote on behalf of WifiForward and the Wireless ISP Association. “EBay currently has about one billion active listings for physical goods at any one time. … Nearly every visit to a commercial web page on the Internet triggers an auction for the right to show an ad.” A former spectrum official told us that with the FCC yet to release an NPRM, it's too early to discuss a possible compromise on geographical license size or other aspects.