FCC's Pai wants to move quickly on 5G

The US Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Chair, Ajit Pai, has said that 5G will be top of the agenda for the Commission’s 2 August meeting.

“We’ll finalise the rules for the auction of airwaves in the 28 GHz band and the auction of the 24 GHz band, which will follow immediately afterward,” wrote Pai on his FCC blog page.

“With so many wanting so much spectrum for 5G, we’re moving as quickly as possible to make these bands available for commercial use. Adopting these rules will pave the way for auctioning these 5G-critical airwaves and allow us to start the bidding on November 14,” he added.

Pai wrote that while these will be the first auctions of high-band spectrum for 5G services, “they won’t be the last”.

“Specifically, I’m excited to announce my plan to move forward with a single auction of three more millimetre-wave spectrum bands — the 37 GHz, 39 GHz, and 47 GHz bands — in the second half of 2019.

“To help facilitate that auction on this timeline, I’m proposing rules to clean up the 39 GHz band and move incumbents into rationalised license holdings,” he wrote. “This will help make the 39 GHz band as attractive as possible for new bidders, while consolidating incumbent spectrum licenses into more usable blocks.

“As part of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking we will consider at the FCC’s August meeting, I’m also proposing to have 100 MHz license blocks for the 37 GHz, 39 GHz, and 47 GHz bands, so they can more easily be auctioned together. These are important steps that will help solidify U.S. leadership in 5G,” he added.

Pai also wants to make network deployment easier, to cater for the smaller, denser infrastructure of 5G networks.

Pai said that a key focus of the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee is easing access to utility poles, and one of its recommendations was streamlining the process to “make ready” those poles for new attachments.

“Instead of having multiple parties sequentially prepare poles for a new attacher, as is current practice, the process can be much quicker if a single construction crew does all the make-ready work at once,” he wrote.

“By making it quicker and cheaper to attach to poles, we can accelerate network buildout and make it easier for new entrants to provide more broadband competition.

“So I’ve circulated an order that would adopt this so-called ‘one-touch-make-ready’ policy while at the same time ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect existing attachments and worker safety,” he added.

Pai said that the order to be voted on at the August meeting will also it make clear that it is “contrary to Federal law for states or localities to put in place moratoria on network buildout”.

Please follow us and share on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe for FREE to our weekly newsletter and bimonthly magazine.