Advanced Television

CBA and 5G stalled?

June 10, 2019

By Chris Forrester

Last week a meeting was held, hosted by the Technology Policy Institute in Washington DC, to hear various presentations and submissions on the increasingly vexed proposal by the C-Band Alliance to restructure 180 MHz of satellite spectrum over the US to help speed the roll-out of 5G.

The meeting was held to review – and perhaps solve the question – “What’s the Answer to the C-Band Conundrum?

Key members of the Alliance made their arguments with Peter Pitsch (the CBA’s Head of Advocacy & Gov’t Relations) telling the meeting that the single most important thing the US government can do to foster widespread and secure adoption of 5G in the US is to make C-band spectrum available to US carriers and their secure vendors as soon as possible. He explained that the Alliance currently had more then two dozen satellites trained onto the US delivering video and data to more than 13,000 receive-only Earth stations.

Pitsch outlined that the CBA’s satellite frequencies are best suited for 5G. “Indeed, China, Korea, Japan and most major European countries have allocated and assigned hundreds of MHz of spectrum in this range for 5G. China Mobile will have deployed 10,000-plus base stations by 2020.”

Analysts from Height Capital, ahead of the meeting, had cautioned that a final FCC order on C-Band was likely to be delayed from mid-2019 (in effect, about now) until September, since an FCC meeting on Aug. 2 might be too close to the end of the public notice comment period. But the analyst still expects the FCC to proceed with a market-based approach to clear the spectrum.

Categories: Articles, Broadband, Policy, Satellite