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C-Band Future

MWC Speakers Stress Importance of Cutting Wireless and Wireline Red Tape

Changes to rules for how wireline is deployed, not just wireless, are important to Southern Linc, said Holly Henderson, its external affairs and compliance director, during a panel discussion this week at the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas. Other speakers at the conference, which is sponsored by CTIA and GSMA, highlighted the importance of the upper C band to the wireless industry.

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FCC commissioners approved an NPRM last month looking at ways to speed up wireless deployments, along with a wireline notice of inquiry (see 2510030056). “We always welcome the idea of less regulation, and we've been following a lot of the FCC activities and certainly trying to give feedback along the way,” Henderson said. “We talk about wireless networks, and we're the wireless industry, but there are a lot of wires” in the network. Southern Linc is watching to see what the NOI might do to help it deploy additional fiber to support wireless operations, she said.

“Every time we cut regulatory red tape, we speed up deployments, we open the door to new innovation and … strengthen America's leadership,” said Melanie Tiano, T-Mobile's director of federal regulatory affairs. She added that the industry's focus today is also on planning for 6G.

Speakers welcomed the FCC’s “Delete” proceeding. It has been more than 30 years since the Telecom Act was enacted, “and there's a lot that has happened in that time, and the rules are not quite aligning,” said Anisa Green, director of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T. “Taking a first stab at outdated and obsolete rules was very smart,” but the agency will need “strong legal footing” to eliminate or modify any rules.

Green said AT&T welcomes changes proposed in items for the FCC’s Oct. 28 meeting, including those on broadband label rules (see 2510070038) and National Environmental Policy Act enforcement (see 2508150050), as well as the renewed focus on the USF. It's unlikely that any of those items can be handled through the FCC’s “direct rule” approach, she added.

Floodplains and Spectrum

The FCC’s evolving approach to towers in floodplains was also praised. In January, Chairman Brendan Carr pulled from circulation a floodplains NPRM from 2022 (see 2501270055). Jennifer Schneider, the head of American Tower’s Washington, D.C., office, said the agency's revised strategy focuses on equipment on towers and electrical facilities, rather than the towers themselves. Towers are difficult to elevate, and “we have buildings [full] of engineers working on making sure the towers are resilient and can withstand all kinds of weather.”

During another panel on spectrum, Raquel Noriega, AT&T's assistant vice president of federal regulatory, said the data speaks for itself on carriers' need for more, citing CTIA's recent report that Americans used 132 trillion megabytes of mobile data in 2024 (see 2509080020). “That is a lot of data,” she said. “I'm not sure what that means, but it's a lot.”

The outlook for carriers has improved since last year, with the restoration of FCC auction authority and the goal of an 800 MHz midband spectrum pipeline in the reconciliation package, said Will Johnson, senior vice president of federal regulatory and legal affairs at Verizon. That’s not the total amount carriers will need, but it's a good starting point, he added.

Upper C Band

Johnson and other speakers predicted that the upper C band would be the next big band up for auction. Verizon spent $53 billion in the initial C-band auction, which was “a real generational investment,” Johnson said. “We love all our spectrum, but the C band really is the backbone of our 5G service nationwide.” But other spectrum is also important, he said, noting that people don’t realize that Verizon invested more in the citizens broadband radio service band and uses it probably more than anyone.

Noriega predicted that in a year, the FCC will have an order out on the upper C-band auction. There are “challenges, but we need to collaborate.” The administration should continue to study and build consensus on other bands for auction, she added.

Economies of scale “only get better if you've got a global band like the C band,” said Jeff Marks, Ericsson's vice president for government and policy. With a harmonized band, “handsets work all over the world,” and “you get to build a single product for the world.” He predicted that the 7 GHz band would be the administration’s next focus after the C band.

John Kuzin, Qualcomm's senior vice president for spectrum policy, said the administration needs to address all the bands it will study for full-power licensed use as quickly as possible. “We cannot have one or more federal agencies go off, do a study, [then] come back 18 months later and present the outcome,” he said. “I could tell you right now what that outcome is going be, and it's not going to be an outcome that's … favorable for the mobile industry.”

In addition, AI will make huge demands on networks, with mobile data needs expected to triple by the end of the decade, Kuzin said. Qualcomm sees AI, extended reality applications, mobile gaming and “consumption of increasingly high-quality video” as driving data demand.

Svetlana Matt, director of public policy at EchoStar, said her company only reluctantly cut spectrum deals with AT&T and SpaceX. “This is not the outcome that we had hoped for or that we wanted,” she said. “However, the FCC had made the determination that, in its view, we were not using our spectrum in a way that best served the public interest.”