New report draws sharp criticism from other industry groups, companies supporting CBRS
Amid ongoing Capitol Hill conversations about new spectrum allocations, a CTIA report attacks the efficacy of spectrum sharing and argues that the three-tiered Citizens Broadband Radio Service is struggling compared to exclusive-use arrangements.
CTIA, which represents mobile network operators’ policy interests, released a report by Recon Analytics this week that claims that CBRS has “low utilization, low market demand, and a dearth of innovative use cases,” as Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst of Recon Analytics, put it.
“Across every dimension and every metric – efficiency, utilization, demand – full power, exclusive use, licensed commercial spectrum has succeeded where CBRS has struggled to date,” the report says, going on to add: “The inescapable conclusion is that CBRS spectrum would be more widely utilized, at greater levels of efficiency, and deliver more value to federal incumbents, commercial users and the American consumer had it been made available for excusive [sic], licensed use.”
“A review of today’s CBRS marketplace shows that CBRS does not live up to the hype as the foundation of innovation and should not be a model for future spectrum policy,” said Entner in a statement. “Given the highly effective, proven track record of exclusive-use licensed spectrum, need for more data on CBRS’ performance, and the fact that all available data points to CBRS underperforming expectations, policymakers should refrain from using CBRS sharing as a model for bands in the future.”
“Licensed spectrum is the platform of the 5G economy that is transforming the way we live and work,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, president and CEO of CTIA. “Data use is up, prices are down, and we are already seeing innovations from driverless cars to AR/VR education – all thanks to exclusive-use, licensed spectrum. We need policymakers to focus on creating a pipeline of additional licensed spectrum to build on this foundation and secure America’s innovation leadership, and not export a still unproven experiment to additional bands.”
However, organizations and companies that are part of the CBRS ecosystem responded by saying that the report gives a misleading timeline on CBRS and relies on outdated utilization data from a year ago.
“The study … about CBRS uses cherry-picked data and overlooks robust success across many different industries,” said industry group WifiForward in a statement. While the CTIA report emphasizes that the CBRS concept was created a decade ago and argues that expected benefits have not materialized in that time, CBRS advocates point out that full commercial use of the band has only been allowed since early 2020 and that Priority Access Licenses were not auctioned until late 2020, with the first PALs issued around 18 months ago. “CBRS usage and deployments are moving far faster than any of the traditional cellular providers’ deployments,” WifiForward added.
Kurt Schaubach, CTO of Federated Wireless, told RCR Wireless News that the CTIA report relies on “cherry-picked data as well as old and faulty measurements, while conveniently side-stepping the evidence that demonstrates the huge commercial success of the CBRS band. In less than three years, more than 285,000 CBRS devices have been deployed nationwide, and there are a record number of users who have adopted the CBRS spectrum, including the 228 winners of the more than 20,000 Priority Access Licenses and hundreds more General Authorized Access users. It’s seen faster, more widespread deployment by a wider and more diverse range of users than perhaps any other spectrum band in history in terms of the commercial wireless industry.”
These spats over spectrum strategy aren’t occurring in a vacuum; U.S. policymakers are in the midst of trying to put together a new spectrum pipeline, with several bills reportedly in the works. Recent public conversations around national spectrum use have focused on sharing as a viable path forward because it is getting more and more difficult and expensive to clear airwaves for exclusive use, particularly federal military users. In particular, federal regulators are preparing to open the 3.1-3.45 GHz band for use, but the Department of Defense has been adamant that the band must be shared. Additionally, the Federal Communications Commission is considering regulation of receiver performance, not just transmitters, in order to increase efficient spectrum use and avoid the type of interference issues that have cropped up in the C-Band and in Ligado Networks’ proposed network plans.
However, it’s also fair to say that CBRS hasn’t necessarily lived up to the momentum that was originally expected, either. In January of this year, Dell’Oro Group revised downward its expectations for the CBRS equipment market, noting that Fixed Wireless Access and mobile broadband are driving CBRS use currently that that the enterprise/private network share of CBRS RAN hardware is expected to improve towards 2026. The CBRS market is still expected to grow, just not quite as quickly as Dell’Oro had previously anticipated.
“CBRS adoption continues to move in the right direction, however adoption is tracking significantly below expectations, driven primarily by diverging trends between fixed wireless access (FWA) and non-FWA including public and private LTE/5G NR,” said Dell’Oro at the time. In addition, one of the operators of the fundamental systems underpinning CBRS — the Spectrum Access System — opted out of the SAS business entirely. CommScope stopped offering SAS services in May of this year, although it still supports the CBRS Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) network that it runs with Google.
For his part, Schaubach says that CBRS has gained substantial momentum in the past year in both device support and utilization. This wouldn’t be reflected in the utilization calculations that were made in the fall of 2021, when Teleworld Solutions was engaged by CTIA to go out and look for active CBRS sites and utilization of the band; that testing resulted in a conclusion that at the time, “CBRS adoption in [multiple major] cities was low, with the most intensive use employing less than 5% of the spectrum city-wide.”
“While CTIA had been critical of CBRS since before the FCC devised its sharing framework, the future must include spectrum-sharing models such as that in CBRS that carefully balance government, industry and consumer interests while optimizing the efficient use of spectrum,” said the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition in a statement responding to the report. “Spectrum doesn’t grow on trees and an exclusive licensed-only model, which CTIA seems to prefer, simply will not work for our wireless future.”
