Commissioner Simington Addresses the Competitive Carriers Association

5G, and the technologies it can enable, are not promised to us. As those in rural America well know, 5G is not an inevitability, or simply a function of time and technological development. It is the product of purposeful effort and long-term planning. The capitalintensive 5G transition has been a decade in the making and we are poised to fully deploy 5G in C-Band spectrum, with the auction of the 3.45 GHz band in sight. But much work remains. In order to ensure the continued success of 5G and that we indeed see robust deployment of 5G services to those who most need it, policy makers must get spectrum policy right; and do so right now. We’ve all noticed that there has already been a mental shift among in some policy circles, from one where the highest and best use of spectrum is one of high-power, exclusive use licensing, to one of a shared spectrum model. I have said myself that I think the need for sharing of spectrum will only increase over the next 20 years. And people looking ahead to 6G often assume that a sharing model will predominate. However, before we make the leap to a sharing-centric model in policy, we should remember that being too early can be even worse than being too late. It doesn’t do us any good if we have the New Coke of spectrum policy. The United States is a huge market—but it’s not the whole world, and we can’t afford to be an island in a sea of exclusive-use, full-power licenses. It doesn’t matter who I ask; device manufacturers, tower equipment companies, network engineers, major telecoms, everyone agrees that for 5G, we need the present licensing model.