Rural Internet Service

[Irving]

How realistic would it be for you to approach owners of unused bands to try and broker a deal to test stuff out? Perhaps the owners of those band licenses are in a great position to create a new market for WISPs. Or, is it all futile unless the FCC changes rules first?

If I were Comcast and had access to largely unused television bands, I think I'd lobby pretty hard to change their use to continue dominating the cable industry.

[Grant H.]

How realistic would it be for you to approach owners of unused bands to try and broker a deal to test stuff out? Perhaps the owners of those band licenses are in a great position to create a new market for WISPs. Or, is it all futile unless the FCC changes rules first?

If I were Comcast and had access to largely unused television bands, I think I'd lobby pretty hard to change their use to continue dominating the cable industry.

It's possible, I've seen similar happen. DirecTV technically holds the license for a chunk of spectrum here in CO that one of the O/G producers I work for leased from them.

The bigger problem is getting hardware manufacturers to produce gear for a band that isn't available to a wide portion of the wireless world. Yes, we can develop radios in house, but the cost and time requirements make it less than ideal for a company like mine. Getting a Ubiquiti or Cambium to build a radio for a band that some small subset of the wireless world gets to use is hard. Add into that the fact that receivers and transmitters for that frequency range are a lot more involved than chipset radios from china, and the cost for the radios becomes more expensive.

The other problem with trying to approach some of the spectrum holders is money. In 2014 there was a spectrum auction and big players like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc payed out something like $45 Billion dollars to buy up the spectrum that was being offered. The most recent round in 2016 came in around $23 Billion for the first round of auctions. Selling spectrum off to big players is always much easier, and usually far more lucrative, than trying to develop something for that band. When I was working for a radio manufacturer, we developed and sold a radio that was specific to the 700MHz band that a company owned. Their plan was to be the single source for spectrum and radios for industrial communications in that band. It didn't work out that well. I believe they went bankrupt, due to lack of interest, and the 700MHz band is now partially cell networks.

With 5G rolling out soon, and the planned performance of it, the idea of using currently unavailable spectrum for something akin to a WISP is maybe plausible, but highly unlikely. In everything I have seen, 5G supports higher speed than WISPs usually provide for thousands of customers, not dozens or hundreds. The coverage will still be an issue, but in the past year I have watched even 4G coverage grow exponentially to cover some extremely remote areas. The down side is that the cell companies then get to set the pricing, which is usually outlandish. This means there will still be a market for WISPs, but they/we just don't have a chance at "new" spectrum.