At the Behest of T-Mobile, the FCC Is Undoing Rules That Make it Easier for Small ISPs to Compete With Big Telecom

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 12, 2018 at 2:39:10 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] At the Behest of T-Mobile, the FCC Is Undoing Rules That Make it Easier for Small ISPs to 
> Compete With Big Telecom
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> At the Behest of T-Mobile, the FCC Is Undoing Rules That Make it Easier for Small ISPs to Compete With Big Telecom
> The rules around the Citizens Broadband Radio Service spectrum were changed in 2015 to make it easier for wireless 
> ISPs to license space, but might be changed right before they are useful.
> By Kaleigh Rogers
> Jan 11 2018
> <https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ev5mm7/at-the-behest-of-t-mobile-the-fcc-is-undoing-rules-that-make-it-easier-for-small-isps-to-compete-with-big-telecom>
>
> Even as President Donald Trump spends his time promising rural Americans that closing the digital divide is a top 
> priority, his agencies are taking steps that will only make that goal harder to achieve. 
>
> The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a rule changethat would alter how it doles out 
> licenses for wireless spectrum. These changes would make it easier and more affordable for Big Telecom to scoop up 
> licenses, while making it almost impossible for small, local wireless ISPs to compete.
>
> The Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum is the rather earnest name for a chunk of spectrum that the 
> federal government licenses out to businesses. It covers 3550-3700 MHz, which is considered a “midband” spectrum. It 
> can get complicated, but it helps to think of it how radio channels work: There are specific channels that can be 
> used to broadcast, and companies buy the license to broadcast over that particular channel. 
>
> The FCC will be auctioning off licenses for the CBRS, and many local wireless ISPs—internet service providers that 
> use wireless signal, rather than cables, to connect customers to the internet—have been hoping to buy licenses to 
> make it easier to reach their most remote customers.
>
> “The vast majority of wireless ISPs are using unlicensed 5Ghz spectrum to connect the customer to their tower,” said 
> Jimmy Carr, the policy committee chair for the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association (WISPA), a trade group 
> representing wireless ISP companies. “5Ghz spectrum is great, you can pack a lot of data on it, but the problem is 
> that it requires a true line of sight between the customer’s home and the tower. Any trees, any hills in the way and 
> you can’t connect the customer.”
>
> With midband spectrum, like CBRS, however, line of sight isn’t a problem. And because it’s licensed spectrum, 
> wireless ISPs would be able to broadcast at a higher power.
>
> The CBRS spectrum was designed for Navy radar, and when it was opened up for auction, the traditional model favored 
> Big Telecom cell phone service providers. That’s because the spectrum would be auctioned off in pieces that were too 
> big for smaller companies to afford—and covered more area than they needed to serve their customers. 
>
> “Say you’re a community college and you want to set up a secure LTE network on a licensed spectrum,” Carr told me. 
> “In the past, you couldn’t do that, because you’d have to buy a third of the state’s spectrum in a license, when you 
> only planned to use a small portion of that.”
>
> But in 2015, under the Obama administration, the FCC changed the rules for how the CBRS spectrum would be divvied up, 
> allowing companies to bid on the spectrum for a much smaller area of land.
>
> Just as these changes were being finalized this past fall, Trump’s FCC proposed going back to the old method. This 
> would work out well for Big Telecom, which would want larger swaths of coverage anyway, and would have the added 
> bonus of being able to price out smaller competitors (because the larger areas of coverage will inherently cost 
> more.) 
>
> So why is the FCC even considering this? According to the agency’s proposal,because T-Mobile and CTIA, a trade group 
> that represents all major cell phone providers, “ask[ed] the Commission to reexamine several of the […] licensing 
> rules.” Oh, also, it seems like doing smaller sized lots would be too much work. 
>
> “Licensing on a census tract-basis—which could result in over 500,000 [licenses]—will be challenging for 
> Administrators, the Commission, and licensees to manage, and will create unnecessary interference risks due to the 
> large number of border areas that will need to be managed and maintained,” the proposal reads. 
>
> Motherboard reached out to the FCC for comment but have not yet received a response.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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