With the White House and Department of Defense (DoD) recently announcing that additional mid-band spectrum will be made available to be shared with industry, the Federal government’s spectrum manager called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to do its part to ensure the partnership occurs smoothly.
The Office of Spectrum Management (OSM) at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) sent a letter to the FCC which “strongly encourages the Commission to issue a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPRM)” that will allow use by private carriers of “commercial mobile broadband on a shared basis with incumbent federal users.”
The FNPRM would be another step in forwarding that spectrum sharing process. NTIA asked the FCC to “seek comment on non-federal technical parameters that would inform effective Federal and non-federal coordination and coexistence in the band.”
The FCC auction of the shared spectrum is scheduled for December 2021, according to U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), who recently took on the additional duties of Pentagon’s research chief.
