Small-area wireless plan falters

Three years ago, the U.S. government decided to offer airwave licenses for small areas so factories, ports and power plants could set up their own wireless networks without relying on commercial carriers.

This week, the President Barack Obama-era experiment is likely to end before the licenses are even auctioned.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote today to abandon its novel small-area plan and instead offer larger licenses covering a minimum of a county. The vote came after carriers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., who can afford to wire larger areas, persuaded the regulators to reconsider.

Supporters of Obama initiative say the change will squeeze out smaller players who could find innovative uses for very local networks covering an area as small as a single building.

“Imagine being at the dawn of the Uber age and doubling down on taxicab medallions,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, said in an email. “That’s what this agency is doing.”

“The commission needs to evolve with the ever-changing marketplace,” FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, a member of the agency’s Republican majority who drew up the revised plan for the airwaves, said in an Oct. 2 speech. The need for 5G networks to use the airwaves has become apparent since the FCC’s previous decision, O’Rielly said.

The new plan “does not favor any one use or favor any class of user, which was a flaw in the last administration’s rules,” O’Rielly said in an email. “Everyone will be able to bid in an auction that will ensure that the spectrum goes to its best use.”

O’Rielly noted support for the change to county-size licenses from industries including cable providers, which increasingly are offering wireless connections to their subscribers.

The change follows a request last year from the largest U.S. mobile providers, including a petition by the CTIA trade group with members including AT&T and Verizon, and a separate request by TMobile US Inc.

The big carriers argued that small license areas were cumbersome to administer and the thousands of users operating wireless systems near boundaries threatened to interfere with other users of airwaves. Supporters of the small area licenses said the interference risk was small, since many systems would operate at low power and indoors. Under the FCC’s 2015 order, access would be sold in each of 74,000 census tracts. That number compares with about 3,200 U.S. counties, according to the FCC.

The airwaves in question, in a part of the spectrum known as the 3.5 gigahertz band, are host to military radars. For years, that ruled out the frequencies for most commercial uses, for fear of interference. Officials in Obama’s administration drew up a plan to let commercial interests also share the airwaves, as long as sensors could shut down transmissions to avoid fouling the military’s signals. That led to the 2015 vote.