Author Archives: Kurt Schaubach

The word is out. CBRS is adding measurable performance and speed to mobile networks. Earlier this week, Sascha Segan published an article in PC Magazine with the headline “Verizon’s New 4G Beats 5G, Big Time.” Segan tested the Verizon network in two New York neighborhoods, and found that the Verizon network utilizing midband CBRS spectrum outperformed their 5G network using millimeter wave spectrum. As he notes, this bodes well for the future when more 5G CBRS radios and devices become available. This was an interesting individual test performed in his local neighborhoods.

Today we are extremely pleased to see the publication of the CBRS Spotlight Report from RootMetrics by IHS Markit, which offers hard data on CBRS performance to the wireless industry for the first time. RootMetrics combines scientific data with real-world mobile performance insights to provide an independent view of carriers’ performance. Based on RootMetrics testing in the second half of 2020, the report clearly demonstrates the rapid growth of shared spectrum use and points to the strong performance gains that wireless carriers can achieve when adding CBRS to existing spectrum.

Real-world Tests in Philadelphia Show Major Performance Increases

RootMetrics’s live testing of Verizon’s network in Philadelphia, shows that the carrier had added considerable bandwidth using CBRS, more than doubling available spectrum from 45 MHz in the first half of the year to up to 95 MHz for its LTE services. There is a lot of great information in the report to absorb, but for me the crux is summarized in this one chart, which shows that Verizon’s deployment of CBRS led to faster speeds for its customers.

Verizon’s median download speed on CBRS of 135.1 Mbps was over twice as fast as its non-CBRS median download speed of 64.2 Mbps in the same test period, and Verizon’s maximum download speed on CBRS of 692.1 Mbps was nearly 300 Mbps faster than its max speed of 404.9 Mbps without CBRS. This is an astounding result that we often speculated would be the case when this wide swath of midband spectrum was released for sharing, but it’s so gratifying to see in a live commercial network.

As the report states, “With the desirable and powerful mid-band 3.5 GHz spectrum at the center of the growing CBRS movement, the acquisition of CBRS spectrum by mobile networks and a host of other organizations could mark a watershed moment on the path toward realizing the true potential of 5G and the full growth of our connected communities going forward. Adding mid-band spectrum to low-band and/or mmWave deployments can augment performance while also helping networks most effectively utilize the best combination of 5G and LTE resources.”

CBRS Benefits

As RootMetrics notes in the report, the benefits of CBRS deployment are many. It is far cheaper than FCC-regulated spectrum, it can be tailored for specific use cases with highly customizable security solutions, and it is the “Goldilocks” of mid-band spectrum, residing in the mid-band frequency band and (3.5 GHz), offering the upside of both low-band and mmWave spectrum. It brings connectivity to rural and other underserved areas with providers like No Limits Broadband, also highlighted in the report, and powers industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions such as the recently-announced 5G private network deployment at the Marine Corps Logistics Command warehouse operations in Albany, Ga.

CBRS and Private Wireless Networks

The report notes that commercial enterprises, universities, and others in the public sector are expected to benefit from CBRS spectrum to provide private wireless networks for business and industrial operations, which will be crucial in cases where Wi-Fi or existing cellular networks have proven unreliable and/or ineffective. Moreover, CBRS provides the additional connectivity and reliability needed for Industrial IoT, smart factories, and other applications that depend on increased capacity and coverage.

The benefits of CBRS shared spectrum deployment and the large gains the entire industry made in the second half of 2020 are undeniable. This report confirms what so many have already come to acknowledge, that shared spectrum is a critical enabler of 5G service growth and that 2021 will be a complete game-changer for carriers, WISPs, private wireless providers, and both business and consumer users of new high-speed service offerings.

As a founding member of the CBRS Alliance, now the OnGo Alliance, it is with special pride and sense of honor that we accepted two of the inaugural OnGo Awards this week. The new awards were designed to recognize industry innovation in delivering CBRS solutions and to highlight the market impact of sharing spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. We won the awards for Excellence in OnGo Operator Deployment and the Judge’s Choice Award.

For Operator Excellence, we were pleased to submit and win the award on behalf of our customer Verizon and our partner Samsung. We thought it was important for Verizon to be recognized for their pioneering shared spectrum vision. Some operators like to wait for others to lead the way and then quickly follow. Not Verizon. It took a visionary like Verizon to understand the value that OnGo could bring to their network and their customers. They joined the CBRS Alliance in the early days, helping to shape the technology model and ecosystem. Verizon trialed their LTE Advanced capability with carrier aggregation over CBRS as far back as 2017, tying together transmissions in the CBRS band with transmissions in their other licensed spectrum bands. These early successful trials showed that adding CBRS shared spectrum to their portfolio could offer higher network capacity, and ultimately, higher speeds to their customers.

By the time they started Initial Commercial Deployment in September 2019, Verizon was already developing an expanded vision for how the role of CBRS might evolve in their industry-leading network. They were exploring how CBRS could be combined with 5G and edge computing to deliver enterprise private wireless networks that remain under the control of the enterprise but also allow Verizon customers to roam onto the public network when they’re in range. Verizon chose Samsung as one of the access point providers to round out the solution with sleekly designed radios that offer a smooth migration path to 5G through a software upgrade.

Then there is the Judge’s Choice Award. This is the category where the panel of judges used their discretion to choose a best-in-class winner – someone who in their eyes had a substantive overall impact to the shared spectrum market. Led by Joe Madden from Mobile Experts, the esteemed panel of independent judges included Gabriel Brown from Heavy Reading, Iain Gillott from iGR; Ken Rehbehn from OMDIA; Mark Lowenstein at Mobile Ecosystem, and Monica Paolini at Senza Fili.

As Joe mentioned while introducing the award, in 20 years the global wireless industry will note 2020 as the year that we changed to shared spectrum, freeing up a previously unimaginable amount of new spectrum for 5G, 6G and beyond. In that context, we are deeply honored to receive the first annual OnGo Judge’s Choice award for having the greatest impact on the industry as a whole. Joe mentioned several factors that went into the decision, including helping OnGo get off the ground as a technology and brand, providing block and tackle on the foundational technology that includes a trusted and secure Environmental Sensing Capability network for detecting and dynamically reacting to Naval radar, developing and deploying innovative business models to take full advantage of the new spectrum, and setting the stage for moving forward with Cloud players like AWS and Microsoft to simplify the deployment of Enterprise private wireless networks.

From day one Federated Wireless has been focused on removing friction for our partners and our customers, and we are indebted to them for their trust and support over the years. We knew that the ecosystem had to be nourished in order for shared spectrum to flourish. We turned a vision into reality, and we continue to do so every day. The entire team feels proud and privileged to receive this industry recognition for our efforts.

December marks a year that shared spectrum networks have been in full commercial operation. During this year when robust broadband communication has become so important for learning and livelihoods, we’ve seen a rapid growth in CBRS radios deployed, numbering well over 100,000 today. At the core of the successful deployment of shared spectrum is a sensor network that can securely detect when naval radar needs access to a portion of the spectrum. Commercial users can then be moved onto other channels, ensuring maximum spectral efficiency. This is the Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) network.

In public forums and FCC filings, Google has recently raised the disingenuous concern that the ESC network is a failure, and that regulatory bodies and the industry should consider an alternate approach through which the DoD would inform Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators when it is planning to use shared midband spectrum – called Incumbent-Informing Capability (IIC). IIC is not a new idea. It was discussed at length and ruled out in favor of ESC prior to the CBRS rules being set in 2015. The FCC and DoD agreed then, and still maintain, that deploying a sensor network is preferable and necessary due to the security and operational risks introduced by deploying an IIC.

IIC networks today require manual input and maintenance, and so introduce the possibility that the largest commercial networks might be taken down by simple human input error. At the same time an IIC can be reliable, secure and accurate if the input can become foolproof, perhaps through automation. IICs may well become the best option for spectrum sharing in the future, which is why the NTIA is opening the discussion once again. We have extensive experience building IIC-like technology (for example the Radio Frequency and Interference Monitoring System for NOAA), and we’re teaming with a world class team to develop effective IIC technology. We know from experience that to do it right will take years of development, testing, and operational training.

As with any futuristic endeavors, the question is whether we want to do nothing while we wait. Would we want to park all of our gas cars while we wait for everyone to have electric? Would we want to ground all planes while we wait for teleportation? Do we want to shut down shared spectrum while we wait for IIC? Obviously not. Google’s recent public stance is nothing more than an attempt to revise history and bypass necessary steps in the deployment of shared spectrum based on the fact that it’s a lot easier and less costly to submit an FCC filing than it is to successfully deploy an ESC network.

Our ESC network has been deployed nationwide since May 2019, with live commercial traffic since September 2019. Since then, we have been working to eliminate false positive data, and greatly reduce the impact of the ESC network itself on commercial CBRS use. We are not seeing the problems that Google cites in their FCC filing. We have heard from customers that Google is having massive problems with the sections of their ESC network that they have only recently deployed, so we believe that’s the root cause of their objection. Many customers who are deploying along the coastlines are switching to our SAS/ESC for just this reason.

We are approaching two years of learning, fine tuning, and improving our ESC network. We’ve identified and mitigated the early interferers we saw when we first stood up the network. We are on our second generation of sensor and second generation of antenna to increase detection sensitivity and fidelity, making sure naval radar is protected while delivering the maximum possible spectrum available for commercial use. Our network has weathered hurricanes and wildfires, and we’ve added battery backups and generators to ensure the network stays up and running. We have redundancy built into our network design to ensure the network remains highly available. We support our network with a 24×7 Network Operating Center to troubleshoot and solve problems as soon as they occur. These are all things that any carrier-grade network operator would do, and it’s all that’s required to continue to deliver CBRS shared spectrum for network densification, for fixed wireless services, and for the fast-growing private wireless market over the next few years.

Don’t take our word. Here’s a recent quote from one of our customers:

“We have been using the Federated SAS for a couple of weeks now and just finished converting our CBRS gear over to Federated SAS this morning. I would like to say, that life without senseless random and unexplained DPA events is much much better!! Your ESC network seems to be head and shoulders above whatever Google is doing!!!!!!” Greg Racino, ZipLink Internet, San Antonio, Texas