Feb. 28 Draft Items Released; O'Rielly Says CBRS Auction Raises Issues

The public notice setting up application and bidding procedures for citizens broadband radio service licenses to be voted on at the Feb. 28 meeting (see here) sets up the agency for a long-awaited CBRS auction, but still Ieaves some issues unaddressed, FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly blogged Friday. The agency also released the other draft items. O'Rielly said unresolved are ways to reduce the protection area sizes and increasing power limits in the band.

The FCC will also vote on a Wireline Bureau draft public notice in docket 20-34 seeking comment through March 27, replies April 10, on competitive bidding procedures and program requirements for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Auction 904. Pai proposed a Phase I auction date of Oct. 22.

The agency proposes the minimum geographic area for bidding as census block groups consisting of one or more eligible census blocks, but it reserves the option to select tracts or other groupings of areas when finalizing the auction design to limit the number of discrete biddable units. "We estimate that prior to the challenge process, there will be more than 66,000 census block groups containing eligible census blocks and more than 33,000 census tracts containing eligible census blocks based on FCC form 477 data" from Dec. 31, 2018. "We seek comment on whether we should retain census block groups or use census tracts as the minimum biddable area of Phase I of the auction," it says. It asks how it could administer alternative bidding areas. The agency seeks to balance bidders' need for flexibility against the need for an efficient and manageable auction, said a fact sheet.

The RDOF Auction 904 draft also discussed a limited challenge process for geographic areas deemed eligible for Phase I auctions, and plans to publish a final list and map of the eligible areas after the challenge process. The RDOF draft also outlines pre-auction short-form application information it would collect from applicants and long-form information from winning bidders to ensure participants would have the operational and financial capabilities to meet broadband deployment obligations.

O'Rielly said cellular market area bidding would have made the bidding process easier but was scrapped for the CBRS auction after facing opposition. He said package bidding will have to be revisited in future auctions, but hopefully bidding software will be at the point where bidders will be able to select the counties they want for a bidding package instead of relying on packages designed by what the FCC software can handle.

The TV white spaces draft NPRM would increase the maximum permissible power for fixed white space devices in rural areas. It said it also would hike the maximum antenna height above average terrain for fixed white space devices, suggest minimum required separation distances from protected services in the TV bands like TV stations and cable headends, and allow higher power mobile operations within defined “geo-fenced” areas. The Office of Engineering and Technology opened a docket, 20-36, for the TV white spaces proposal (see 2002050051).

Also released Friday were the TV carriage election notification draft order and the cable video programming public inspection file draft NPRM and a pair of C-band clearing items (see here and here). So was a Further NPRM regarding state and federal agency information sharing with regard to outages.