The good news is that Senators Rounds, Fischer, and Cotton have agreed on a framework that restores the FCC’s auction authority in the reconciliation package. This authority lapsed in 2023, largely because Sen. Rounds introduced six month extension in March that would have expired in six months.

The sticking point has been the Pentagon’s refusal to give up spectrum in the lower 3 GHz and in 7.4 – 8.4 GHz band it uses for radar. As the successful bombing mission at three nuclear sites in Iran proved, current military radars can’t always detect modern aircraft, but Defense still still sees value in it.

Fair enough, but the days of radar providing indispensable surveillance for war fighters are numbered. The agreement sunsets the radar exception in ten years, by which time we should have a successor system of some sort.

The New Pipeline

The new pipeline will be useful even though it’s not ideal. It would have been better to release the entire 3 GHz band for civilian purposes, but half a loaf and all that.

The FCC will be able to repurpose 500 MHz of federal spectrum as well as 300 MHz of non-federal spectrum for data networks, including both terrestrial and non-terrestrial LEO and similar satellite systems. This will probably hold us over for 5 – 7 years, at which time we can begin to create a pathway for the next generation of mobile broadband.

The new framework appears to be silent in clawing back the over-allocation of the the upper 6 and lower 7 GHz band. This would be a good candidate for reassignment, obviously, but nothing good happens in DC without a fight.

Not Everyone is Happy

Unsurprisingly, there is some pushback from the other side of the aisle. Sen. Cantwell, a long-time champion of constituents Microsoft and Boeing, is doing her bit to protect local interests.

She’s raising complaints about Wi-Fi and radio altimeters that essentially recycle upper C-Band issues that emerged after the Spectrum Incentive Auction. One issue she raised was about the altimeters that operate outside their assigned frequencies.

This issue was resolved the first time it was raised can’t be taken seriously at this stage. She also expressed concerns about Wi-Fi and Doppler radar that are hard to take seriously. These things appear to come from years-old memos that weren’t deleted when after they were resolved.

Ancient Missives

We first addressed altimeters and 5G in 2021 when the FAA and its industry partners had a meltdown over the possibility of interference. I took the discussion to Bloomberg Law shortly thereafter to contextualize the issue as risk assessment. The FAA soon forecast a complete collapse of civil aviation if even a single 5G phone was allowed to operate in an airport (more or less.)

Next the airline lobby jumped in, and before we knew it Congress held a hearing on the calamity. Then things went quiet for a year until FAA proposed a token fix for a problem that was completely the fault of aviation according to testing conducted by NTIA.

We’ve had hard evidence that there is no interference problem within the frequency band assigned to radio altimeters. 5G stays out of it and it’s completely up to the altimeters to stop eavesdropping on adjacent bands, the common etiquette in spectrum.

Please, don’t make me write another half dozen posts and a couple of more op-eds on why this is a bogus issue. Life is too short for that kind of aggravation.