Well, This Is Awkward

Wave Wireless, a fixed wireless broadband provider from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s hometown of Parsons (KS), is among the 182 companies pushing back on the FCC’s approach to a valuable swath of mid-band airwaves. Wave Wireless — which Chairman Pai said serves his parents in a 2017 tweet — and its fellow companies, mostly small rural providers, want the FCC to preserve smaller geographic license sizes in the 3.5 GHz spectrum band. The agency is mulling rule changes for the band. National carriers want larger geographic license sizes, but fixed wireless broadband providers say licenses that are bigger than census tracts are not viable for their businesses. “Without census-tract-sized licenses, we will have virtually no ability to acquire protected spectrum in this band,” the providers wrote in a letter. “That would be an intolerable outcome that would harm our rural broadband businesses and inhibit our ability to grow, but worse it would harm the millions of consumers for whom mid-band spectrum is the key to high-speed fixed broadband access.”