As the Trump administration squares off with China’s Huawei over who will dominate the world’s next generation of wireless networks, another battle is emerging closer to home. And in this one, the force causing the most concern isn’t a shadowy Chinese firm, or even a company at all. It’s the Pentagon.
As they bicker, Chinese companies aren’t waiting: Huawei and others are moving quickly to build and sell equipment that exploits exactly those frequencies. As other nations stock up on infrastructure built by Huawei and other Chinese firms, gear from China is becoming the standard in much of the world — and U.S. producers fear that they’re being shut out of a quickly developing new technology by their own government.
Not all spectrum is equally useful. At the low-frequency end, signals can travel great distances and penetrate objects, but carry very little information. At the high end, so-called millimeter-wave bands can carry huge quantities of data, but don’t travel far and can be blocked by leaves or even thin walls.
The questions run deeper than how to get the Pentagon to let go. In fact, it’s not even clear what the military is using its chunks of the spectrum for. Sen. Mark Warner , a former wireless executive who’s now the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, a decade ago tried, and failed, to force the Pentagon and other government agencies just to quantify how much of the spectrum they’re actually using. “That’s a hard nut to crack,” Warner said in a recent interview.
“Of all of the places I’ve been involved with this president, this is the one in which the Trump model ... has been the most effectively resisted by the deep state.”Gingrich says he most recently spoke to Trump about the issue late last year and came away disappointed in the administration.
The FCC, meanwhile, in late June will auction some priority licenses to access these mid-band airwaves held by the Navy after years of tough negotiation involving the Pentagon and other commercial and government players. But so far, the military has not given up much in the way of underlying spectrum holdings.the military needs to be parsimonious.
The wireless industry is increasingly impatient. “Other countries have gotten ahead of us on mid-band,” one telecom executive told POLITICO, requesting anonymity to speak frankly. “We’re kind of pulling teeth trying to get access to it.”
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