The 6 GHz, citizens broadband radio service and C bands got much of the attention at the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Global Summit Thursday. Another hot topic was CBRS-like sharing beyond the 3.5 GHz band. FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly touched on all three bands during his keynote speech (see 1906270026).
The telecom industry is eager to help mitigate national security threats stemming from equipment installed on its networks that could be compromised by vendors' ties to the Chinese government, executives said Thursday. Stakeholders wanted to reassure Commissioner Geoffrey Starks at an FCC workshop on his "find it, fix it, fund it" proposal to address vulnerabilities in communications networks (see 1906190050). But carriers, especially those with small, rural subscriber bases, said "rip-and-replace" missions for companies that have Huawei or ZTE equipment installed on their wireless, wireline or broadband networks would be neither quick nor inexpensive. Some estimates place the cost to remove and replace the compromised equipment at well over $1 billion.
Consensus is starting to emerge on the C band, with the different proposals getting closer together, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said at the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Global Summit Thursday. The FCC needs to get as much as 300 MHz available for 5G “as soon as possible,” O’Rielly said. “My first priority is speed,” he said.
Regulatory uncertainty about the 5.9 GHz band's future threatens the progress auto industry OEMs and some state transportation departments are making in deploying vehicle-to-everything technology (V2X) for safety purposes, Global Automakers (GA) said in a call Thursday with reporters, arguing its case for a flexible-use licensing regime for the band. How much traction the auto industry proposal has at the FCC is unclear. The industry narrative about using the band to save lives "is a powerful one," but it's also somewhat undercut by relative lack of dedicated short-range communications (DSCR) in the band, said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marc Scribner.
An internal “review” at Micron Technology found the memory-chip supplier could “lawfully resume shipping a subset of current products” to Huawei because they aren't subject to Commerce Department export administration regulations and entity list restrictions, said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on a fiscal Q3 earnings call. Micron reinstated those shipments about two weeks ago, he said Tuesday.
FirstNet is starting to lay out a road map for the for the future of its network, and is listening closely to advice from first responders, the board was told at its quarterly meeting Wednesday. Staff described the map as a key document to win more public safety participation in the nascent network. Officials said the network must keep up with advances from 5G.
This commercial space boom is fundamentally different from the one that collapsed in the 1990s, executives said Wednesday at a State Department/Commerce Department conference on commercial outer space. The industry should be able to keep growing with smaller satellite sizes and masses meaning lower payload costs, said Spaceflight Industries CEO Curt Blake. Lower payload costs "have really created a platform open to everyone now," he said.
Congress should consider offering the tech industry a set of standards to ensure proper moderation practices for malicious content, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters after a hearing Wednesday. Democrats from the panel hammered witnesses from Facebook, Google and Twitter, saying industry isn't doing enough to remove content from bad actors like the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooter (see 1905150047). Republicans mostly focused criticism on First Amendment issues and claims of anti-conservative bias.
The orbital debris problem not being talked about enough is avoiding "rocks" -- satellites over which the operator loses control -- Iridium CEO Matt Desch said Wednesday at the Secure World Foundation space sustainability summit. "It's basically a missile ... to create more debris." There's lack of discussion in the industry about rocks because it doesn't want to invite reliability standards, he said. If just a fraction of satellites in a constellation fail, it could be a significant danger if that constellation is made up thousands of satellites, he said.
Lawmakers “would be well served to take” up policy issues on their work on privacy legislation like anti-conservative censorship, antitrust concerns and wireless carriers' location tracking practices (see 1906120076) “a piece at a time and come to bipartisan agreement so that we have guidelines that are going to last,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. She's on a Judiciary Committee informal privacy legislative working group (see 1903180038), one of several ongoing efforts to draft a bill. Also at Wednesday's Free State Foundation event, FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips urged Congress to not adopt privacy legislation that would allow a private right of action.