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The CEOs of the two biggest wireless carriers in America wrote a letter to Pete Buttigieg. The companies had been working for years to launch a new portion of their 5G networks, a launch that had been scheduled for December but was pushed back due to vague air safety concerns. The Department of Transportation was asking for more time just days before the launch.
In addition to the tens of billions of dollars we paid to the U.S. Government, we paid billions of dollars more to the satellite companies to enable the December 2021 availability of the spectrum. Thousands of our employees have worked non-stop for months to prepare our networks to use this spectrum.
The FCC pushed the spectrum launch back to January 5th, then two weeks later to January 19th, but it has been an unusual road for US wireless carriers. The fear is that the latest round of 5G spectrum will pose a threat to airlines and their passengers. It is best to unpack it one piece at a time.
What is happening here? I have a phone.
The C-band is the area where carriers and airlines are fighting over spectrum. T-Mobile is using a separate mid-band patch at 2.2 GHz, so it is mostly sitting this fight out.
Some of the best parts of the 5G spectrum are not all that different from this. The mid-band frequencies are the main way that AT&T and Verizon are planning to use 5G.
They paid $65 billion for this. They don't have enough mid-band spectrum.
Harold Feld wrote about the issue in November and says there is a reason they paid $65 billion for the spectrum. They don't have enough mid-band spectrum without it.
We are at the last step of a very long process. If you bought a 5G-enabled phone, you already own a device that can send and receive on those wavelengths, and there are already cell towers that can manage those signals. At which point the C-band airwaves will get a lot busier, all that is left is to turn them on.
Why didn't they switch them on?
The airlines are concerned that the C-band airwaves will interfere with their equipment. They are worried about radar altimeters, a device that bounces radio waves off the ground to give extremely precise altitude readings. It is a crucial device for landings in conditions with limited visibility and needs an empty patch of spectrum to work. In a Turkish Airlines crash in 2009, nine people were killed when the autopilot system responded to a faulty altimeter reading.
The entire industry is not comfortable with anything that might interfere with altimeters. The public interest would not be served if tens of thousands of existing aircraft worldwide were inadvertently no longer provided the safety protection enabled by radio altimetry equipment due to interference from adjacent bands, according to a filing by an airline pilot's association.
They have tested this, right? Does it cause problems?
This is the 65-billion-dollar question. The spectrum has been rolled out in 40 different countries without any problems, although some of those countries are operating it at lower power levels. The FCC has been talking to various airline groups about this for three years, and a lot of them are still worried.
It's not clear how many faulty altimeters are out there or how they'll respond to a flood of 5G traffic.
There are a number of measures that the FCC has in place. There is a full 220 MHz of clearance between the spectrum used by the radio altimeters and the new 5G spectrum. The FCC carved an extra 20MHz from the 5G holdings to give aircraft more space. There are several restrictions on how 5G towers should be configured near airports to avoid flooding the airwaves in areas where planes are landing. It should be easy to avoid interference in a modern plane.
Not every aircraft has a modern radar altimeter. Some altimeters are affected by signals from outside the intended spectrum bands. This is a malfunction, but it wouldn't have been relevant before C-band came online. It is not known how many faulty altimeters are out there or how they will respond to a flood of 5G traffic. Even a single interference-related crash would be tragic, and it is hard for airlines to feel secure about the roll out.
The ideal solution for the FCC and wireless industry would be for the FAA to launch an industry-wide effort to find and replace faulty altimeters. They would have liked it to launch in 2019. It is unlikely that it will happen in the next two weeks.
Why don't carriers give airlines more time to test their equipment?
The deadline for AT&T and Verizon is the same. The US has had 5G-enabled phones for two years now, and carriers are expecting a lot of new customers as holiday devices come online. Both networks have some 5G capacity, but they are stretched thin without the C-band spectrum. AT&T will be shutting down its 3G network in February as part of the transition to 5G. Without new spectrum, the result will be spotty, inconsistent service. T-Mobile has been aggressively marketing its 5G network to draw away customers while skating by without any of these problems.
The carriers were so eager to accept the deal that another two weeks isn't much of a deal, but delays could hurt their business plans. The drag on the network gets a little more severe each month, and the damage from a $65 billion dead asset gets harder for shareholders to ignore.
The carriers were worried about how long this would last. He says it. You have a combination of surging demand and concern that you won't be able to use the spectrum.
What happens now?
The airlines and pilots will be on high alert for the first sign of interference when AT&T and Verizon switch on their networks on January 19th. The FAA will use the extra two weeks to craft an airworthiness directive for any planes that might be affected, which will prevent the most severe shutdowns or delays. It is likely the best the agency can do.
The most frustrating thing is how much time agencies have wasted without addressing the issue. This should not have been a problem. The FCC started this rulemaking in 2019. He told me that the steps needed to address this are straightforward. It isincomprehensible.
