Wireless Industry Feebly Trying To Kill Promising Shared Wireless Spectrum Effort

Back in 2015, the FCC announced that it would be adopting rules for shared commercial use of the 3550-3700 MHz band (3.5 GHz band), creating an unlicensed Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and a system to manage shared government, private, and public access to this spectrum. The move was a broadly welcomed one, as it not only let multiple parties share the same spectrum, it boosted the availability of unlicensed spectrum for localized, innovative use cases.

Well, it was welcome to everybody but the nation's biggest wireless providers, which have been doing everything in their power to scuttle the system. Primarily because it takes power from them, and gives some of that power to things like libraries, schools, or even smaller local competitors and wireless ISPs (WISPs).

Wireless industry policy and lobbying groups like the CTIA have been throwing sand in the gears of CBRS efforts for years. Now the industry is out with a new report it purchased from industry-cozy research firm Recon Analytics, trying to crap all over the unlicensed spectrum effort, insisting that spectrum should be put up for auction:

The inescapable conclusion is that CBRS spectrum would be more widely utilized, at greater levels of efficiency, and deliver more value to federal incumbents, commercial users and the American consumer had it been made available for exclusive, licensed use."

Folks who've been working to get this alternative spectrum sharing communications system up and running for the last seven years (despite the CTIA's attempts to ruin it) were decidedly... not amused:

Michael Calabrese, director, Wireless Future Program at Open Technology Institute at New America, said a lot of people are calling it a CTIA smear campaign" against CBRS because CTIA doesn't want the 3.1-3.45 GHz band to end up looking more like CBRS than traditional spectrum bands that are licensed.

Wireless spectrum policy experts like Harold Feld were quick to call the study out for what it was: namely an effort by the wireless industry to get government to kill off a potentially useful unlicensed spectrum effort and instead ensure that most of the the lower 3 GHz (3100-3450 MHz) band is chopped up and sold (licensed) to them... and only them:

Obviously the wireless industry would very much prefer a future where nearly all valuable spectrum is only sold at auction to giant wireless companies with massive budgets and political power. But the CBRS effort really does promise something better: namely letting licensed, unlicensed and federal users all share the same valuable resource.

After wireless giants tried for years to prevent, then harm the project, they thought it might be fun to point to their successful meddling as evidence they were right. Unfortunately in DC, sometimes that's all it takes to kill a promising initiative, and the industry has had a pretty solid six-year stretch of getting pretty much anything and everything it wants (see: death of broadband privacy rules, merger approvals, death of net neutrality, the stalled nomination of Gigi Sohn to the FCC, the lobotomization of the FCC's consumer protection authority, the elimination of media consolidation rules...).