Public Interest Advocates Meet with FCC Commissioner

Michael Calabrese was quoted in Communications Daily after he and Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, met with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. 

Public interest advocates met with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to express disappointment that the draft spectrum frontiers order “reportedly allocates” all but 600 MHz of more than 3,000 MHz in the 28, 37 and 39 GHz bands to exclusive licensing over wide geographic areas, said a filing on the meet­ing. Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, and Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, met with Clyburn and staff. “Exclusive wide-area licensing by auction is a poor fit with the propagation characteristics of millimeter wave spectrum that is inherently intended for small cell deployments in localized, high-traffic areas in urban cores and busy indoor venues,” they told Clyburn. “If a few large carriers foreclose access to 80 percent or more of these [millimeter wave] frequen­cies, both outdoors and indoors, the likely outcome will be to leave the spectrum fallow in the vast majority of the country and in tens of millions of homes, businesses and community anchor institutions.” The order should also allocate at least half of the 37 to 37.6 GHz spectrum for shared, general authorized access, “or its equivalent,” said the filing in docket 14-177.