STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER BRENDAN CARR

Re:	Use of Spectrum Bands Above 24 GHz For Mobile Radio Services, GN Docket No. 14-177; Amendment of Parts 1, 22, 24, 27, 74, 80, 90, 95, and 101 To Establish Uniform License Renewal, Discontinuance of Operation, and Geographic Partitioning and Spectrum Disaggregation Rules and Policies for Certain Wireless Radio Services, WT Docket No. 10-112

America’s Main Streets are getting 5G Ready.

You can see it on a walking tour of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where a local provider is installing 50 small cells.  You can see it outside Central High School in Woodstock, Virginia, where a new small cell is enabling a connected curriculum.  And you can see it in the miles of new fiber and other high-speed deployments that are connecting everything from a family farm in rural Michigan to an after-school boxing gym in downtown Detroit.

You can also see it a thousand miles from here at a manufacturing plant in Iowa where Sabre Industries is working to meet increased demand for its smart poles.  The poles look like ordinary utility or light poles—some are even visually identical to city trash cans—but within them are all of the antennas and radios needed for next-gen deployments.

Sabre’s 360,000 square foot plant is not a quiet place.  The iron needed for the poles rolls into the facility on railroad tracks.  It’s then run through a series of presses and welding stations before being galvanized and painted.  Tyler, who is one of the 500 employees who works there, walked me through the process, and he says that production and demand for these new poles is on the rise.

The good-paying jobs that small cell deployments are creating at plants like Sabre’s are part of a broader story about the economic opportunity that can come when we clear the way for next-generation deployments.  But the FCC has work to do if we are going to win the race to 5G, if we are going to extend these opportunities and deployments to communities across the country.  

We took a significant step in the right direction earlier this year when we cut about $1.6 billion from the federal regulatory costs associated with small cell deployments.  By reducing red tape, we can flip the business case for thousands of communities—ones that otherwise might miss out on 5G.  And we are currently looking at additional infrastructure reforms that can enable greater deployments.

On the spectrum side, we take another concrete step today in our effort to free up the high-band spectrum that could help support next-gen networks.  We do this by finalizing rules for the 24 GHz band.  We do this by extending our bipartisan, 2017 decision regarding mobile spectrum holdings to the 28 GHz, 37 GHz, and 39 GHz bands.  And we do this by seeking comment on opening up the 42 GHz and 26 GHz bands for flexible use, which include spectrum covered by the MOBILE NOW Act, which Congress passed earlier this year. 

With respect to the Lower 37 GHz Band, I might have struck a different balance than the one the agency reached in 2016.  But recently stakeholders have not shown significant interest in revisiting that decision and, overall, the item reaches the right result by promoting greater commercial access to millimeter wave spectrum.  So it has my support.  

Going forward, the Commission is going to keep up the work of identifying low-, mid-, and high-band spectrum, and we will continue to remove unnecessary barriers to infrastructure deployment.  I look forward to further progress on those issues.
Thank you to the staff of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau for your work on the item.