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FCC Undoing Rules That Make It Easier For Small ISPs To Compete With Big Telecom (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a rule change that 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 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. 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.) As for why the FCC is even considering this? You can blame T-Mobile. "According to the agency's proposal, because T-Mobile and CTIA, a trade group that represents all major cellphone providers, 'ask[ed] the Commission to reexamine several of the [...] licensing rules,'" reports Motherboard. The proposal reads: "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 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. 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.) As for why the FCC is even considering this? You can blame T-Mobile. "According to the agency's proposal, because T-Mobile and CTIA, a trade group that represents all major cellphone providers, 'ask[ed] the Commission to reexamine several of the [...] licensing rules,'" reports Motherboard. The proposal reads: "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."
There is already plenty if spectrum for that. The big providers have already purchased up national LTE coverage, GSM/CDMA coverage, Wi-Max coverage and even fall-backs to EDGE coverage.
This is new spectrum space, which could be using by small municipalities to offer local wireless Internet coverage. They're most likely going to have to offer such coverage with better deals than the major carriers, with the trade-off being limited range.
being a former manager at Verizon
Pai was no mere 'manager' at Verizon—he was Associate General Counsel. Before that, he was at the DoJ. So he has a history of switching back-and-forth between lucrative private-sector positions and federal government appointments. Lather, rinse, repeat.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Everyone is subject to the same laws regardless of how much money they have.
Yes. It's equally illegal for the billionaire and the pauper to sleep under a bridge.
That is how a fucking free market works.
I'm a big fan of the free market, and I have to say it seems like you don't know the first thing about how it works.
Second, this has nothing to do with cell phones, so the comment about how someone's phone doesn't cover this band and there will be no phone that do is irrelevant.
Third, it is under consideration, not a done deal. The headline is flamebait -- "FCC Undoing" is wrong. They might.
And fourth, yes, licensing small areas creates a lot more work for everyone involved than licenses for large areas. It's called "coordination", and the work goes up exponentially with the number of parties that need to be coordinated. Someone has to make sure that the licensee for Backwater, IA doesn't interfere with the licensee for South Backwater, IA. That's harder than telling T-Mobile in IA not to interfere with AT&T in the next state over.
All of that doesn't mean I support the change. It's just not that earth shattering to begin with.
I'm no expert, but It seems to me that access to specific spectrum by cell providers is not the issue with mobile connectivity. It's not like you can't manufacture a radio that can't transmit on more than one band. It's that the various players have never had an incentive to share/pool or at least wholesale resources to each other. This is clearly in the "Regulate-able" zone, since this is *our* spectrum we're talking about. A resource that we can all benefit from, and that we literally *have* to share it in order to use it effectively.
I live in a rural area, there is a cell tower 1/2 mile from my house, but I don't have signal, because the tower doesn't talk to my "brand" of phone. I don't even know what the specifics are, and I could switch providers, but this particular provider has no signal in other areas where I often go, whereas the one that doesn't work at my house works most other places that I go.
If there had been a regulation 20 years ago that said "Hey, let's find a common industry solution so that all phones can talk to all towers, and then let the owners of those towers worry about billing each other" we wouldn't have the mess we have now with competing standards and antagonistic competitive business. I sometimes even end up places where I have *signal* but the tower tells me (essentially) that while I can talk to you, I won't let you use me, since your provider doesn't have a billing arrangement with me in this area. I realize these things are complicated, and I'm perhaps oversimplifying, but they've been made more complicated than they need to be.
It's like "Hey! you can't drive on this road! You have a Ford! Only Chevys can drive on this road!" That's insane, right? But we put up with it with mobile communications, because... why, exactly? I realize this isn't an issue in metro areas (they have issues too, just different ones) but if the system were managed and engineered properly we wouldn't have this type of issue at all.
Letting the incumbent competing players have even MORE power and control is probably not going to solve this problem. This is one of those issues that's going to have to play out over a long time now, since the window for regulating a unified system probably closed long ago.