CBRS: Does It Live Up To The Hype?

Has CBRS lived up to the hype? January 2020 marked the highly celebrated FCC authorization of “Full Commercial Deployment” of the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service band. This milestone in the road to spectrum sharing was the culmination of a process that began in 2013.

CBRS, a section of 150 MHz in the 3.5 GHz to 3.7 GHz range, is split among three types of users, enabling public-private partnerships between commercial industry and government organizations.

Essentially, the DoD, the incumbent user, collaborates with those who have purchased Priority Access Licenses (PAL users) and open, unlicensed general authorized access (GAA) users.

Users in the PAL and GAA tiers — spanning a range of sectors including education, healthcare, manufacturing and more — have deployed tens of thousands of CBRS base stations (CBSDs) for a myriad of uses such as mobile broadband, fixed wireless access and enterprise private cellular. But what does this look like? What does “full commercial deployment” look like in practice? A number of the latest developments below:

Low-income internet access in Cleveland

Cleveland nonprofit DigitalC plans to implement private LTE for a new internet service in low-income areas of the city. Using Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud, DigitalC will install its own CBSDs to offer LTE service separate from public LTE networks, with indoor and outdoor customer premises equipment, a network core and radio access.

Security and safety in Las Vegas

Cox recently announced a collaboration with the city of Las Vegas to install devices on a CBRS network in the pilot location of a downtown park. With network-connected devices such as video cameras and sensors on light poles, the city will be better able to monitor data on visitor attendance and after-hours activities for parking lot management, safety dispatches and general trend analytics evaluation at Baker Park in central Las Vegas.

Streamlined factory operations

Machinery producer John Deere purchased five CBRS PALs to eliminate its reliance on Ethernet cables used to connect factory equipment to the internet at its global headquarters and factory operations in Rock Island County, Illinois.

The LTE connections bring full reliability and mobility to its existing network, which currently includes machine centers, human-operated hand tools, robots and autonomous vehicles. With the CBRS network, the manufacturer will be able to collect and monitor data of its human-operated tools and send its autonomous vehicles on dynamic rather than pre-mapped routes throughout the factory.

Other use cases

We covered a number of industries’ uses of CBRS shared spectrum in our Market Update earlier this year, ranging from military to agriculture. Just a few highlights:

• Education — Arlington Public Schools’ “1–2–3 Connect Me” program set up private networks solely for student use to connect to the APS network from home, without requiring the County to build additional fiber.
• Healthcare — Memorial Health System connected outdoor hotspots to indoor networks, enabling nurses to test and triage patients outside the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic and manage tracking, communications and patient monitoring.
• Agriculture — Trilogy’s Rural Cloud Initiative started by connecting 18 greenhouses on a 600-acre farm.
• Military — US Ignite conducted IoT research at Fort Carson in Colorado for vehicle data and video traffic from route-monitoring cameras, as part of a broader IoT research initiative in collaboration with Fort Carson, the city of Colorado Springs and the University of Colorado Boulder.

So, you be the judge: has CBRS lived up to its hype? With these specialized, private LTE networks offering consistent high data transfer, mobility, exceptional outdoor coverage, and customizable capacity, we certainly think so. As we rely on our airwaves more and more to stay connected, this new model of spectrum sharing shows great promise for making the best use of our airwaves.