A municipal broadband project in California will wirelessly bring 1 Gbps speeds to residents, businesses and community sites in Santa Cruz. Siklu Communication, Cruzio and the City of Santa Cruz on Tuesday unveiled a project to use hybrid fiber-wireless technologies to roll out the wireless service in less than three months. The service will connect existing fiber from independent ISP Cruzio to millimeter wave radios provided by Siklu. The radios can be attached to building facades, roofs, poles and other locations to wirelessly extend the reach of fiber. Millimeter wave frequencies allow the radios to transmit multiple gigabits reliably with low latency and no interference and congestion. Chairman Izik Kirshenbaum said in a news release that Siklu aims to deploy the same technology “in other U.S. communities in the months to come.”
Representatives of the Wireless Innovation Forum, CTIA and various companies active in the area updated the FCC on work on standards for the 3.5 GHz band. The industry representatives met with officials from the FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology, said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 12-354. It said the companies have completed an interim technical report on exchange of information between spectrum access systems and between SASs and citizens band radio service devices. At the meeting were representatives of Airspan Networks, AT&T, Ericsson, Federated Wireless, Google, Huawei, Key Bridge Global, Motorola Solutions, Nokia Networks, Pathfinder Wireless, Qualcomm, Ruckus Wireless, Sony and Verizon.
FirstNet plans to put in place its own approval process for devices that can be safely used on its network, said a Monday blog post by Kameron Behnam, FirstNet device test and certification manager. The FirstNet certification is on top of approval of the device by the FCC and commercial carrier acceptance. “In general, the mobile device approval process is necessary to verify that a device meets certain technical specifications and unique operator requirements to ensure that the device is interoperable with the operator’s network and doesn’t negatively impact network performance,” Behnam wrote. “FirstNet plans to have its own carrier acceptance test plan that focuses on validating a device is safe for use on the Band 14 network, testing device features unique to public safety, and testing performance aspects of Band 14 that are above and beyond the 3GPP [3rd Generation Partnership Project] and other specifications. Examples of features unique to public safety include direct mode, proximity services, mission critical push-to-talk, etc.”
Qualcomm reminded the FCC its rules and test procedures don’t take into account portable devices that operate in high-frequency spectrum and suggested a possible approach the agency could take, in a filing in docket 14-177. Qualcomm said it urged the FCC to use the limits and test procedures established by ANSI/IEEE and the International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection for hand-held device operations in the millimeter wave bands. “These standards are used for approvals of portable devices that operate in the millimeter wave bands in the European Union, China, Japan, Brazil, and Canada, among others,” Qualcomm said. Qualcomm representatives met with officials from the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology. “This view is unanimously supported by all parties who commented on this issue” at the FCC, the filing said.
NAB filed a letter at the FCC Thursday slamming a Google report (see 1603250019) on the FCC’s proposed vacant channel proposal and its likely effect on low-power TV and translators. NAB noted that Google filed the report only four days before the TV incentive auction formally started. “Google’s analysis is uninformed, careless and misleading,” NAB said. “Its conclusion is thus a work of pure fiction.” The FCC’s vacant channel proposal “when coupled with the already damaging effect the auction will have on TV translator and LPTV services, will harm viewers across the country,” NAB said in the letter. “As many as one-quarter of all UHF LPTV and translator stations in the U.S. may be unable to find new UHF channels following the auction.” NAB accused Google of looking for spectrum for free and questioned the timing of the report. “The Commission should be focused squarely on conducting a successful auction and preparing for a post-auction transition that will be unprecedented in its scope and logistical complexity; not on speculative and preferential giveaways to half-trillion dollar companies that have elected not to participate in the auction,” the broadcasters said. Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, fired back at NAB. “Even in the worst case scenario markets, Google’s results confirm that any adverse impact of preserving a vacant channel for unlicensed devices that benefit all Americans is extremely unlikely and minimal,” he said. “NAB’s claim that up to a quarter of secondary broadcasters could be displaced is ridiculous on its face, since today the vast majority of TV channels are not in use even in the largest metro markets.” Post-auction it is likely at least 30 channels will remain, “with many full power stations going off the airwaves,” he said. “A few speculators holding construction permits may not find a spot, but they were never going to serve their communities in any event.”
An FCC order granting Deere a waiver allowing it to install TV white spaces (TVWS) equipment manufactured by Koos on agricultural equipment (see 1603240068) shows that even when lawyers think they have a “regulatory scheme that works,” engineers can come up with a new idea that doesn’t fit, said Mitchell Lazarus, lawyer at Fletcher Heald, Wednesday in a blog post. “Grant of the waiver is subject to 14 specific conditions, and is premised in part on the common-sense observation that waivered devices will be used in rural areas and in large agricultural fields having few broadcasters and widely dispersed TV receivers,” Lazarus wrote. The waiver is effective only in places where at least half the TV channels are available for TVWS use, he said. “That last is bad news because, personally, we were hoping to use the waiver and some TVWS gear to stream the HGTV Channel across the lawn to our suburban John Deere riding mower,” Lazarus deadpanned. “Maybe it’s just as well. The popcorn would bounce all over the place.”
The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Thursday approved a waiver request by Deere allowing the company to install TV white space devices manufactured by Koos on agricultural equipment. Deere requested the waiver last summer (see 1508210035). “Our action here will permit [Koos] to obtain an equipment certification grant for a fixed white space device that will be installed in Deere agricultural machinery, such as tractors, self-propelled harvesting machines, sprayers, etc., to provide a variety of agricultural applications,” the order said. “We find that granting these waivers is in the public interest because they will provide for broadband machine-to-machine (M2M) data communications aimed at increasing crop yields and reducing food production costs, all without causing harmful interference or materially adding to spectrum congestion for other authorized users of this frequency band.” OET said fixed white spaces devices are subject to strict controls: "Such devices must: 1) initially register with a white space database to enter their coordinates and antenna height above ground level, 2) obtain a channel list before operating, and 3) re-check the database at least once daily. If moved to another location or if its stored coordinates are altered, a fixed device must also re-register its new coordinates and antenna height."
New tests by the Korea-based Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute found that LTE-unlicensed and Wi-Fi can peacefully coexist in unlicensed 5 GHz bands, said a blog post Thursday by Patrik Lundqvist, Qualcomm director-technical marketing. “In this over-the-air demonstration, LTE-U co-existence was put to the test in scenarios with a large number of Wi-Fi access points (APs) from Cisco and Wi-Fi stations (STAs) from Samsung, all sharing the same 20 MHz channel in 5 GHz,” Lundqvist wrote. The baseline was made up of 15 Wi-Fi APs, “all on the same channel, where each AP was connected to one user (STA),” he said. “Each STA was at a relatively close distance to its corresponding AP, which means that the signal quality was sufficiently guaranteed.” The tests verified the LTE-U operations didn’t interfere with the Wi-Fi operations, he said. Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, said concerns remain. “It is helpful that the Korean institute tested one of several scenarios related to the still open question of whether LTE-U can coexist with Wi-Fi without disrupting the ecosystem nearly every consumer depends on for affordable mobile device connectivity,” he said. But other very different scenarios still must be examined, Calabrese said. “For example, the Koreans apparently assumed users would be close to the Wi-Fi access point,” he said. “Consumers, schools and smart city deployments need to be very worried about the impact on Wi-Fi when users are further away from the access point. If LTE-U does not detect [access points] at a signal level similar to the coexistence protocol in use by Wi-Fi, the coverage areas of deployed Wi-Fi hotspots could be cut in half. In that case, LTE-U would create an unnecessary tragedy of the commons.”
The TV incentive auction should end up being bigger than the AWS-3 auction, said Preston Padden, former executive director of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, in a Wednesday blog post. The AWS-3 auction had only 70 qualified bidders, with pricing driven primarily by four bidders -- AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Dish Network, he said. “Based on detailed auction simulations in the FCC record, the 600 MHz auction is likely to include a net of 90 or 100 MHz of paired spectrum -- twice as much as in AWS 3,” he said. “And, demand is greater in this auction. 104 bidders have filed in the 600 MHz auction -- more than the 70 in AWS 3.” Carriers have tried to downplay the value of the spectrum, Padden said. “But just a few weeks ago, Bill Smith, president of AT&T Network Operations, gave a speech in which he candidly admitted the continuing need for more spectrum,” said Padden (see 1602230042). The 600 MHz spectrum is also uniquely valuable, he said. “It travels long distances and goes through walls. Even advanced 5G systems will need low band spectrum for signaling channels.”
The Dynamic Spectrum Alliance said India has become the latest market to explore use of TV white spaces spectrum with the government there issuing eight experimental licenses in the 470-582 MHz band. “The purpose of these licenses is to carry out experiments at several locations using TV white space-like rules and regulations already adopted (or being adopted) in other countries such as Malawi, Ghana, Singapore, the Philippines, UK, USA and Canada,” DSA said Thursday. “This decision opens up opportunities for the use of sub-1 GHz spectrum in India in either an unlicensed or lightly licensed fashion without the need for spectrum auctions.”