- After a rather tumultuous year, the CBRS community is looking for new signs of stability
- More spectrum is starting to feed the pipeline for exclusive licensed purposes, which takes some pressure off the CBRS camp
- The ecosystem is focused on keeping power levels low and getting hold of more spectrum for CBRS use cases
It’s been a year for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) ecosystem.
It started off with CBRS users fending off a proposal by AT&T to upend the entire CBRS ecosystem and move it from its current home at 3.5 GHz down to the lower 3 GHz. Sprinkle in some maneuvers by the Department of Defense (DoD), the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) didn’t expressly protect CBRS spectrum and ongoing efforts to increase power levels, and you’ve got all the makings for One Heck Of A Year.
Fortunately, a few pressures that were on CBRS earlier this year appear to be abating. Some conversations have shifted to the 4 GHz band as a source for future full-power, licensed spectrum. It also helps that other spectrum is being made available. EchoStar’s sale of spectrum helps to feed the spectrum pipeline via secondary markets, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is teeing up more mid-band spectrum in the upper C-band for auction.
Fierce recently caught up with Jason Wallin, OnGo Alliance board director and senior principal architect at John Deere, and Dave Wright, policy director for Spectrum for the Future (SFTF). The OnGo Alliance is the chief advocacy group for CBRS and SFTF is a coalition that includes Comcast and Charter Communications, as well as Federated Wireless, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and NCTA.
Both Wallin and Wright see the tide turning in some respects, pointing to positive signs such as this letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr from 10 Republican senators sticking up for CBRS and recent statements by Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty and Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez.
Of course, they’re also keenly watching what happens with the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the FCC launched last year. CBRS was initially set up in 2015 as a way to foster a new, diverse set of users under a three-pronged shared spectrum framework unique to the U.S., and the NPRM is a way to examine how it’s all going and make changes where they see fit.
Fights over CBRS power levels
One of the more controversial proposals the NPRM put on the table is increasing power levels in the band, which would please wireless carriers. But many smaller entities, including rural broadband providers, are opposed to higher power levels – as are the cable companies that bought CBRS licenses.
It’s the cable companies – which are increasingly seeing fixed wireless access (FWA) competition from mobile players on their turf – that are often singled out as having bought CBRS licenses without aggressively building them out, a knock that CBRS naysayers use against the CBRS camp.
But Wright said it’s not really a “wireless vs. cable” kind of fight here. He characterized it more of a “wireless carriers versus everyone else” battle.
“It's literally everybody else against mobile. It's mobile who wants the higher power, which isn't surprising, given that they have high power exclusion licenses on either side of CBRS,” Wright said, referring to the 3.45 and 3.7 GHz bands.
“I understand their motivation, but what they're asking the FCC to do is to turn CBRS into yet another high power macro cellular band for them at the expense of everyone else who's operating in this,” he said.
More than 422,000 active CBRS base station radios are deployed nationwide, according to the OnGo Alliance. Besides cable operators, WISPA’s members use CBRS to serve broadband to homes in rural areas. Schools, libraries, utilities, oil & gas and agriculture use CBRS spectrum for campus-wide and/or industrial applications. Amusement parks, airports and vehicle manufacturers use it for their own private networks.
John Deere goes with CBRS
John Deere bought CBRS licenses in five Midwestern counties and uses the spectrum to connect cellular devices within its facilities. The farm equipment manufacturer expects that five years from now, 80% of the connectivity in its plants will come from cellular, with 10% on Wi-Fi and the remaining 10% on old Ethernet equipment, Wallin said.
“We have fully drank the CBRS Kool-Aid,” he said, noting that the John Deere has successfully deployed its own networks in other countries as well. However, “it’s certainly a lot easier with the CBRS infrastructure.”
John Deere is just one of many entities using CBRS in their corporate facilities. “There are more than 1,000 unique network operators today, of which John Deere is one, but all these other manufacturers are using this as well,” Wallin said.
CBRS: growing and diverse
Wright pointed to a slide that illustrates the complexity of the CBRS ecosystem with a dizzying array of logos representing various players that are supporting it. Yet it only represents a portion of the broader CBRS ecosystem – and it’s only getting bigger with AI.
“I’m not sure I anticipated ten years ago the amount of video that was going to be used over CBRS,” he said. “It’s cameras on factory floors capturing nuts being screwed into equipment and making sure that it’s aligning to the right place.”
All these sorts of videos are being uploaded through the network to an AI or machine learning system to analyze what’s happening in the network. “It’s driving a lot of traffic in the uplink direction, which is sort of the opposite of what we’re used to for public networks,” he said.
That’s driving the need for more spectrum. “We don’t believe that the 150 megahertz that we have is going to be enough,” Wallin said. “So we are strategically looking at what are some other opportunities for us to use shared spectrum.”
Broadly speaking, their preference would be for TDD mid-band spectrum, which could be frequencies in the 2 GHz - 4.9 GHz range where there’s a 3GPP band designation, Wright said.
The CBRS industry likes to point out that CBRS is an American innovation, developed to meet American needs and led by American companies. That’s a theme that would seem to thrive in the current Trump Administration’s playbook. Whether that’s how FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sees it remains to be seen. In 2021, he indicated an interest in increasing power levels, but he hasn’t said much about CBRS since taking over as chair this year.
Perhaps we’ll find out in 2026. Until then, it’s clear that the coalition behind CBRS is going to keep highlighting its successes and letting policymakers know what’s at stake: a vibrant, viable ecosystem that’s showing the world how shared spectrum can succeed.