Federated Wireless CEO: CBRS is doing really well but we can make it better

To hear Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi tell it, the Citizens Broadband Radio Services market is going gangbusters. Why is he saying that? Well, the CBRS industry has taken a bit of a beating the past few years, namely from the U.S. wireless industry’s biggest lobbying group, CTIA. The organization doesn’t want CBRS’s shared spectrum model replicated elsewhere, and it launched a fairly massive smear campaign that dubbed CBRS a “failure.” Then, to make matters worse, AT&T proposed that the entire CBRS band be moved down river, to the lower 3 GHz band, a move that would, if not kill, seriously injure the CBRS movement. The Department of Defense recently appeared to pile onto AT&T’s idea when it suggested that CBRS licensees be moved to the 3.1-3.4 GHz band. So, while privately held Federated's update is particularly germane this year. “Given all the discussions that are going on, we want to give an update where we are with CBRS in general,” Tarazi said. Here’s a snapshot of how it’s going: 450,000 CBRS radios deployed and more than 350,000 fixed wireless consumers are using CBRS. Some 90 percent of all smartphones shipped in the U.S. today have CBRS in them, and “it’s the No. 1 system today for private wireless in the U.S., allowing us to catch up with China,” he said.