The FCC should adopt a three-tier access system...

The FCC should adopt a three-tier access system for the 3.5 GHz band, based on recommendations by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, public interest groups told the FCC in comments posted by the agency Monday. The FCC is examining the band for shared use and small cells. Under that proposal, tiers would be offered for incumbent access, priority access and general authorized access, said comments by the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance, Public Interest Spectrum Coalition and WhiteSpace Alliance (http://bit.ly/WdaSxk) in docket 12-354. The groups said geographic exclusion zones “should be based on actual deployment scenarios and sized solely to protect incumbent users.” The FCC “should minimize protection zones for incumbents as much as possible, by adopting requirements that are based only on the interference tolerance of incumbent operations and not the tolerance of potential new operations,” the groups said.