The Citizens Broadband Radio Service Proceeding Advances – But When Will The Service Be Up and Running?

[Commentary] As we reported a year ago, the Federal Communications Commission has been hard at work developing the Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the 3550-3700 MHz (3.5 GHz) band. Under the new regulatory scheme, the Commission aims to try out a three-tiered access framework. Three different categories of users – incumbents, users holding Priority Access Licenses (PALs), and users with General Authorized Access (GAA) – will share the band under the control of a Spectrum Access System (SAS). The SAS is a database-manager-on-steroids that will allocate spectrum slots on the fly according to users’ respective priorities. While 2015’s order established many aspects of the new system, attentive readers will recall that more work was needed to flesh out important details. Now, after considering issues raised in a Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking as well as numerous petitions for reconsideration, the Commission has finalized the remainder of the 3.5 GHz rules.

So when can you expect to fire up your shiny new 3.5 GHz equipment? Probably not for another few years, unfortunately. Though testing of equipment is being done by the likes of Ericsson and Qualcomm, the FCC still must approve at least one SAS database administrator as well as the Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) system that will be used to provide information to the SAS to protect federal radar incumbents. And the Commission will need to auction the PALs, although GAA license-by-rule use may occur before then.