The Free State Foundation's Fourteenth Annual Policy Conference – #FSFConf14 – was on May 6 in Washington D.C. The opening panel for the conference featured current FCC Commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, along with former FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. One of the communications law and policy topics that came up during the panel conversation was receiver interference immunity.
Receiver interference immunity policy was first brought to public attention by Commission Simington at FSF's 15th Anniversary Gala Celebration in October 2021. On March 24, the Commission issued a Notice of Inquiry to look into the issue. At #FSFConf14, Commissioner Simington had more to say on the matter:
There's been a significant scientific and engineering effort for some time to try to resolve some of the problems with entrenched poor-quality receivers. And poor-quality receivers are always a little bit of a judgment call: How do you balance it against price? How do you balance it against performance? How do you balance it against other criteria? But there is no doubt that there are a lot of services out there where the receivers have not kept pace in terms of spectral efficiency with you see in sectors where that is more prioritized, like wireless mobility. What I'd like to see come out of the proceeding is an attempt to address this question without getting too programmatic and telling receiving manufacturers how to do their jobs. I don't think people necessarily appreciate the difficulty of a receiver regulation regime that would be comparable to the transmission regime that we have right now because, with receivers, you can't test them meaningfully in the lab. You have to test them in the field. And to a degree, what you're testing in the field is not even the receiver itself but the environment and the interaction of the receiver with the overall geographical environment at that point in time, with that particular level of solar radiation, etc. It gets very complicated very fast. What I’m hoping to come out of this proceeding is something of a rights regime, where it's possible to say that "In order to operate at a particular service you have to accept a certain level of interference before you can raise a harmful interference claim," effectively creating a safe harbor for conforming transmitters.
We look at a number of approaches. My favorite is the one that I've just outlined, the harm-claim-threshold approach. By getting to some sort of a regime like that, my hope is two-fold: First of all, that we highlight areas where there are still possibilities for great spectral gains because of increasing receiver efficiency, and thus asking the question: "To what degree continued receiver inefficiency in the large guard bands that are required to support it?" And asking the question: "To what degree that’s still in the public interest?" The second thing is, by getting to a high degree of certainty – or at least a much higher degree of certainty – that you're operating within a safe harbor, hopefully entities planning to increase service and engage in further buildouts will have a greater degree of security and not feel that at any point that they could be subject to criticisms despite operating within the terms of their license.
Discussing spectrum, Commissioner Simington stated: "The difficulty is, at this point, there is no greenfield left." And the difficulty is magnified because of Americans' demand for and expectations of continuing improvement in service:
To pick one example, wireless data consumption, on a per capita basis, my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests, has gone up by a factor of about 140 times in the past ten years. Freeing up spectrum for this use and for the IoT uses that are going to ride on top of 5G networks and perhaps eventually be even larger than consumer commercial uses, there is going to need to be a lot freed up for that. Likewise, there is going to need to be things freed up for relatively high-powered unlicensed uses. And we can't do that while continuing to give blanket respect to receivers that were designed in another era…receivers adapted for an interference environment that is increasingly irrelevant as we continue buildout.
Yet Commissioner Simington emphasized his opposition to the FCC taking a proscriptive regulatory approach to the issue of receiver interference immunity:
Do we want to say to people: "You should fix your receivers"? That's hard to say at a regulatory level. It would, in a certain sense, require the FCC to become the R&D shop for the industry, and I don't think anyone wants us to do it. And I don't know we could do it without completely changing the face of the agency, going on a hiring binge, and we'd out of step with international norms. So there are a lot of reasons not to take that approach.
For more from Commissioner Simington and the other panelists, check out the video for #FSFConf14.
(*Note: The #FSFConf14 quotes contained in this blog are based on an unofficial, edited transcription made by the author of this blog. The edits were made for purposes of readability but none of the meaning was changed in doing so.)
Posts
