Washington, D.C. – WifiForward and Spectrum for the Future today joined other next-generation wireless leaders to provide input on the highly anticipated National Spectrum Strategy (NSS) Implementation Plan set to be released in March. In a letter signed by 17 commercial spectrum users, public interest stakeholders, and defense companies, the advocates urged the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to ensure access to essential spectrum resources and preserve national security through coexistence.
“The decisions made following the NSS will directly affect the nation’s ability to maintain and promote our global competitiveness, national security, and national security technology leadership with our allies,” wrote coalition partners. “To this end, we urge the NTIA to adopt an Implementation Plan that is aggressive in expanding the pie for a wide variety of public, commercial, and national security uses. This should entail accelerating the development and adoption of innovative spectrum sharing technologies that not only meet the immediate and future needs of Americans and the goal of advancing our national security technology leadership. The potential of spectrum coexistence frameworks to revolutionize access and efficiency in spectrum use is immense, and their promotion should be central to NTIA’s efforts. These frameworks are already proving quite successful in the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use and within the Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the 3.5 GHz Band for shared licensed use.”
The authors also cautioned against anti-competitive efforts, modeled after China’s goals, to clear the 3 GHz and 7 GHz bands for exclusive licensing to a small handful of legacy carriers.
“It is particularly concerning that strategies like relocating incumbent users could result in protracted delays particularly in the cases of the Lower 3 GHz and 7 GHz bands. In those frequencies, transitions could exceed a decade, and the ultimate feasibility of clearing or compressing federal use in those bands is questionable, given the lack of comparable spectrum, estimated costs, and serious disruption to the armed forces. Such long delays are untenable and would deny consumers access to much-needed spectrum while undermining other vital commercial and government interests that could be served through shared, licensed, unlicensed, and hybrid frameworks.”
WifiForward is an ad hoc, broad-based group of companies, organizations and public sector institutions working to alleviate the Wi-Fi spectrum crunch and to support making Wi-Fi even better by finding more unlicensed spectrum.
Spectrum for the Future represents a diverse coalition of innovators, anchor institutions, and technology companies who agree that an inclusive approach to wireless spectrum policy is essential to America’s future technology leadership, industrial might, and global competitiveness.
