NTIA Says CBRS Model Works Despite Wireless Industry Concerns

Dynamic sharing and the citizens broadband radio service are a model for the future, NTIA said Monday in a blog post and new report by the agency’s Colorado lab, the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS). The support for CBRS comes as the administration moves forward on a national spectrum strategy. Last year, CTIA, which favors exclusive-use licenses where possible, questioned how well CBRS is working and the extent of deployment (see 2211140062). CTIA isn't backing down.

“Innovative spectrum sharing frameworks are key to unlocking additional bandwidth for wireless connectivity across the country,” said Deputy NTIA Administrator April McClain-Delaney: “The success and growth of the CBRS band shows the promise of dynamic spectrum sharing to make more efficient use of this finite resource.”

CBRS “is working,” NTIA said: Through dynamic sharing, “DOD can use the same spectrum for its critical missions while companies can use it for 5G and high-speed Internet deployment.”

The ITS report looks at data over a 21-month period, ending Jan. 1. CBRS deployments grew “at a steady rate with a mean quarterly increase of 12.0% and a total increase of 121%” over the period, the report said. ITS found 128,351 active CBRS devices in areas subject to protections for federal use of the band.

CBRS offers three tiers of service -- protected federal and nonfederal incumbents, priority access licenses (PALs) and general authorized access (GAA). ITS found GAA predominated, making up 85% active uses, and two-thirds of active PAL users also had at least one active GAA grant. With the administration’s focus on closing the digital divide, the report found more than 70% of active CBRS devices were deployed in rural census blocks.

“CBRS remains an unproven experiment in spectrum sharing, with attributes such as low power levels, which make it impossible to provide broad coverage,” CTIA said in a statement Monday: “To deliver secure and reliable wireless to all Americans, and secure America’s economic and innovation leadership, we need a pipeline of exclusive-use, full power licensed spectrum.”

CTIA also raised concerns in a recent filing on the national strategy. A wide-area deployment under the lower power CBRS rules “would require five to seven times more base stations than traditional commercial licensed network deployments,” CTIA said: “Full-power licensed regimes, like the C-Band and the 3.45 GHz band, are a better model for future mid-band access.” Though NTIA’s request for comments “places heavy emphasis on dynamic spectrum sharing, the reality is it is still nascent and has yet to be proven effective in its current form.”

“The ITS deployment data clearly show that three-tier spectrum sharing with the military at 3.5 GHz is an unprecedented success,” emailed Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America: “CBRS proves that additional bands of military spectrum that cannot be cleared can be shared to meet local spectrum needs.” Calabrese said CBRS is being used to help close the digital divide. “We have documented dozens of school districts using CBRS a schools-as-cell-tower strategy to connect tens of thousands of low-income students to close the homework gap for good,” he said.

CTIA argues “that while some sharing with the DOD is fine, the CBRS paradigm has not worked to create significant new investments or business models that have scaled up in a way that exclusive has,” New Street’s Blair Levin told investors in a Monday note on looming spectrum battles. CBRS is making “headway” with private networks, Levin said. He cited as an example Kyndryl, which worked with Dow Chemical to deploy “a private CBRS network in the largest chemical plant in the western hemisphere.”

Exclusive-use “generally has an upper hand in terms of politics” as a way “to maximize revenues for the Treasury,” Levin said: “One can argue about the wisdom of setting spectrum policy on that metric, but it is a powerful message to many on the Hill and in the Administration who want funds for other purposes.” But the dynamic isn’t always straightforward, he said. If the cost of clearing the lower 3 GHz band is really $120 billion or more, “a sharing option with PALs licenses -- which would result in lower bids but much lower costs -- could produce more upside for the Treasury,” he said.