White Paper
Negative Impacts of Higher-Power Operation on the Citizens Broadband Radio Service
White Paper Provided by Spectrum for the Future
Executive Summary
Valo Analytica conducted this technical analysis to evaluate the harmful impacts of increasing allowed power levels in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS). The findings of this technical analysis are clear: increasing CBRS transmission power would dramatically increase harmful interference levels, thereby disrupting the carefully calibrated CBRS ecosystem, reducing how many network operators can co-exist in the band, and effectively overpowering and undermining existing PAL and GAA operators’ ability to use the band. In other words, as a result of increased power levels, the diverse and fast-growing array of operators using the CBRS band today would be reduced to a fraction.
This analysis uses actual CBRS deployment data combined with additional details from representative real-world CBRS deployments at John Deere (manufacturing), Miami-Dade International Airport (transportation & logistics), and Amplex Internet (rural broadband). In each case, the interference from increased power levels is clear and would cause massive throughput erosion, shrink private network coverage, and fundamentally undermine the spectrum access and innovation the CBRS band was carefully designed to foster.
Key Top-Level Findings
High-power operations will harmfully disrupt existing operations of both Priority Access Licensees (PAL) and General Authorized Access (GAA) operators.
- If fewer than 2% of CBRS base stations are converted to high power, there would be a massive loss of data throughput across the CBRS ecosystem, a permanent data loss that would slow network operation to a crawl.
- Each high-power device deployed in the band would dramatically and disproportionately preempt shared use across as much as thousands of square kilometers, undermining the availability of GAA spectrum upon which 96% of existing CBRS operations rely.
- If deployed, higher power levels will overwhelm existing operations in a manner that neither the existing technology (e.g., SAS) nor current FCC rules are equipped to manage. As a result, CBRS license holders will face catastrophic service degradation on the channels they paid to secure at auction. The negative impacts would be felt all across the CBRS networks used by so many, including those used in Education, Academic Research, Agriculture, Communications, Healthcare, Hospitality, Manufacturing and Transportation.
When applied to real-world deployments, higher power levels in this study were shown to have the following illustrative impact:
- As a result of higher power, John Deere's CBRS deployment would incur a 1000x degradation of throughput and latency, rendering substantial portions of their network used in their American manufacturing facility unusable. Further, CBRS network coverage in their office facility would shrink from its current facility-wide multi-acre coverage to an area smaller than what is covered by a pair of wireless ear buds.
- Miami International Airport (MIA) risks losing nearly a third of its CBRS network capacity if higher power is allowed. Given that MIA uses its network extensively for security, public safety offload, identification of foreign object debris on the tarmac, baggage handling, and even Customs and Border Protection operation, the loss of such network capacity would be "catastrophic."
- Amplex Internet, a rural Wireless Internet Service Provider in Ohio, represents a real-world cautionary tale of the harmful impact of higher power on CBRS networks. Due to Canadian operations today at power levels comparable to those proposed for CBRS, parts of its network are already suffering from network outages and a loss of network reliability - disrupting the ISP's service to a significant portion of its customer base. As a result of higher power, Amplex’s rural customers lose their Internet connectivity as their previously stable wireless broadband links are overwhelmed by high power from up to 200 km away.
