CBRS Auction Likely to Take Place Next Month as Planned, O'Rielly Says

“We’re going to let the market take the direction it wants,” O’Rielly said. He hasn’t sought access to confidential auction information and will be watching with everyone else. “The times are economically challenging” but companies are ready to go on an auction, he said.

“The companies are out in the field … installing equipment” and the market is taking off, O’Rielly said. Some companies pulled back investments because of COVID-19, “but even with those circumstances we’re seeing growth in this segment.” How the band will be used remains to be seen, he said. O’Rielly predicted the sharing approach in 3.5 GHz will be used in other bands: “We’re at the beginning of a new approach to spectrum policy.”

O’Rielly expects an active secondary market for the CBRS band. “Not only have we blessed it, we’ve actually promoted it,” he said. There likely won’t be many licenses left unsold and a second auction “but we’ll just have to see,” he said. The CBRS Alliance has done good work to make the band viable for 5G, O’Rielly said. “I was laughed at for the idea that there would be 5G in CBRS,” he said: “Now we know that that is actually going to happen. The hard work has been done. … 5G in CBRS is a natural fit.”

The CBRS Alliance launched with six members in 2016 with the goal of making sure LTE and now 5G “can operate as effectively and as optimized as possible” in the band, said President Dave Wright. It now has 163 members, he said. The group is focused on “anywhere that there are gaps that are going to become an impediment,” he said. Another focus is certification, he said: “We want to create an interoperable ecosystem.”

“Tens of thousands of radios” are already deployed in CBRS, Wright said. There’s a mix of lower-power and higher-power outdoor devices, he said. CBRS has many uses, including for providers that want to supplement their networks and others that want to launch networks, he said. Sectors including education, healthcare, transportation and energy are interested in the band and the PALs, he said. Phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, gateway devices and IoT modules are being offered with CBRS capability, he said.

The availability of bandwidth is critical to making a building attractive to commercial tenants, said John Gilbert, chief operating officer at Rudin Management commercial real estate management company. That has meant fiber, he said. CBRS is a “game changer,” Gilbert said. With CBRS, “now it’s wireless and now it’s mobile and now there’s a big fat pipe that ultimately we can connect to,” he said. It’s “indisputable” that the more data management companies collect, “the more efficiently we can run our buildings,” he said: CBRS “will allow us to grab that very granular data on a floor-by-floor basis … without interfering with any existing networks.”

CBRS provides access to 150 MHz in most of the U.S, said Mark Gibson, senior director at CommScope, a spectrum access system operator. “It’s pretty much free and clear. You’ve got to get a SAS and if you’re interested in a PAL, you’ve got to buy a PAL. … It’s a big deal.”

The 3.5 GHz band is “really ideal spectrum” with good propagation characteristics and throughput, said Elizabeth Bowles, president of Aristotle, a wireless ISP in Arkansas. “It’s got a lot of things going for it,” she said. “It’s relatively clean even before the SAS” and available even in an urban area like Little Rock, she said. WISPs will be able to use the band to offer LTE, she said.

Bowles, also chair of the FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, said CBRS was also talked about as “rural solution,” but there also unserved people in urban areas: “Technologies like CBRS can do a lot to help get service to those people in a cost-effective way.”

ConnectX Notebook

Massive MIMO works by using 16 or more connections between the network and the user device but won’t work in all spectrum bands and for all 5G deployments, said Mike Wolfe, CommScope global vice president-wireless network engineering, in a presentation. T-Mobile is using 600 MHz for its 5G coverage layer and AT&T 850 MHz, Wolfe said. Other operators are doing the same, he said. “For those frequencies, it’s really not practical to use a massive MIMO approach there because the antenna solutions to support that would get so large and so costly it would be very difficult,” he said. In the low-frequency bands, most carriers are using a more conventional 4G architecture with “a pretty traditional passive radio connecting to a passive antenna,” he said. For high-band, massive MIMO is necessary because of the propagation characteristics, he said: “It’s not a one-size fits all” and “there’s going to be a whole range of solutions that are deployed across the network.” It will be hard to separate what’s 4G from what’s 5G in a network, he said.