FCC TAC Working Group Reports Problems Obtaining Government Data for Sharing Paper

The current iteration of the FCC’s Technology Advisory Council, with its focus on 6G, held its final meeting Thursday, its first meeting in 2023. TAC members approved two white papers and reports by its working groups. Andrew Clegg, co-chair of the Advanced Spectrum Sharing Working Group, told TAC the group faced roadblocks getting data from the government. TAC approved recommendations and a white paper from the WG, which the FCC hasn't posted.

“This meeting is a culmination of a very condensed schedule in 2023, which ran from March through August, and required very fast-paced work, truly a Herculean effort,” said TAC Chair Dean Brenner, a former Qualcomm executive. When TAC started last year, it was the only U.S. governmental body “beginning to consider and plan for 6G,” though that work has since been picked up by the National Security Council, he said.

“6G is still in a very early stage, which is the perfect time to provide this input,” Brenner said: “The world is not waiting for the U.S. to wake up and begin working on 6G.”

The focus of the sharing WG was the remaining mid-band spectrum that hasn’t already been addressed, said Clegg, who represents the Wireless Innovation Forum. “There’s been no end of things at 3 GHz and no end in sight for things at 3 GHz,” he said. NTIA’s detailed spectrum summaries don’t go above 7 GHz and the group was focused on bands from 7.125 to 24 GHz, he said.

The WG requested from NTIA “as much information as they felt they could provide, in detail, for us to do this study,” Clegg said. The amount of information NTIA “deemed they could supply was effectively zero,” he said. “We didn’t really get any input beyond what’s already publicly available, which is pretty scant right now,” he said.

The WG used NTIA’s federal spectrum summary, which extends to very-high-band spectrum, but that dates to 2010 and is a “very high level summary of government use,” Clegg said. The WG was forced to look mostly at industry use, while taking federal use “into account the best we could, based on the information that we had available,” he said. NTIA didn’t comment.

FCC commissioners approved this month a notice of inquiry on nonfederal use of spectrum (see 2308030075) and a similar look at federal spectrum would be helpful, said WG co-Chair Monisha Ghosh, engineering professor at Notre Dame and former FCC chief technologist. “We have to come up with a process which enables this information to be made more available to decision makers when they’re trying to figure out what spectrum to share,” she said.

Ghosh said the group hoped to highlight bands for sharing, but couldn’t without more information. “We have allocations which have been around in many cases for decades,” she said: “We need to assess what the spectrum needs are because the needs have changed” though “pretty much everybody wants more spectrum.” As much as the U.S. has led the world on spectrum sharing “we’re still very, very static,” she said.

“When you share with the federal government, there is not as much give and take as there should be,” Clegg said. “DOD in particular says, ‘this is what we need’ and you have no visibility into whether they really need [the frequencies] or not,” he said. Clegg said when he was working on the citizens broadband radio service band, he started to view DOD as “as a third spectrum regulator” and one not subject to the Administrative Procedure Act.

TAC also approved a white paper by its 6G WG and recommendations from its Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Emerging Technologies WGs. None was immediately available.

The 6G paper looks at the global and national landscape, new spectrum and security needs and ways to close the digital divide in education, said co-Chair Brian Daly, AT&T assistant vice president.

“6G has been recognized as a critical technology by the U.S. and other governments, in light of the increasingly tense geopolitical situation,” Daly said. The government is pushing revitalization of the U.S. semiconductor industry through the Chips and Science Act, recognizing in part that mobile phones use 26% of semiconductors and the remaining parts of the communications sector another 24%, he said. In April, the NSC and National Science Foundation held a 6G summit (see 2304210069), he noted.

Digital Divide

One part of the report that raised questions from TAC members was a section on how 6G can help close the digital divide.

Where fixed wireless is deployed in rural areas it’s often by wireless ISPs, using CBRS and other unlicensed spectrum “for cost reasons and ease of market entry,” said Henning Schulzrinne, former FCC chief technologist now at Columbia University. The report shouldn’t imply we need 6G to close the divide, he said.

Brenner responded that the major carriers are already serving millions of customers using fixed wireless. “It remains to be seen what the future of that is and how prevalent that will be,” he said. Daly said the report looks at whether there are ways 6G can be designed to address greater connectivity: “That’s slightly different than saying we need 6G.”

The divide isn’t just a rural problem, with some of the biggest gaps in urban and suburban areas, said Martin Cooper, technologist and founder of Dyna. “One cannot get a complete education without full-time access to the internet,” he said: “The result of having the divide, of having a large segment of our population who are not fully educated … is profound and requires a great deal of more emphasis than just saying everybody ought to have access to the internet.”

Parts of Los Angeles don’t have broadband, said Steve Lanning, Viasat vice president-operations. The speed at which technology is being deployed has the potential to make the divide worse, he said. When you look at the cost of densifying networks to provide the highest level of services, the places a provider can afford to serve will be “where the people are and where the money is,” Lanning said.

“Some may have even not been aware that all this work has been going on,” said Ron Repasi, chief-FCC Office of Engineering and Technology. “Some that are not involved in the day-to-day activities of the TAC maybe even thought that it has been dormant or has just kind of lost connection with the commission -- that of course has not been the case,” he said.

FCC officials said in July that TAC has been quiet this year, but its work remains critical, and the committee will be rechartered (see 2307030020).