- CBRS gives industry a route to control their own private wireless networks
- Manufacturers and industrial users have a stake in a stable sharing regime
- The American Made 5G Coalition's immediate policy request is certainty, not a new subsidy
The small “5G” symbol on a consumer cellphone has done a remarkable job of obscuring a much more interesting application of that technology: enabling machines and people to move around an industrial site under the control of the business that runs it.
John Puskar, CEO of the American-Made 5G Coalition, wants to turbocharge that use case in America by ensuring those businesses have straightforward access to spectrum, equipment and a domestic supply chain.
At the heart of his manifesto is Citizens Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS, which, sadly, is not the same thing as “Breaker breaker! Looks like we got ourselves a convoy!” CB radio.
CBRS is shared dynamically, with a spectrum access system coordinating users and protecting incumbent federal operations. Puskar describes the effect in plain commercial terms: companies can access spectrum themselves instead of depending on a small number of holders of exclusive licenses. “It gives them this level of control that they've never had before,” he says.
There is something pleasingly egalitarian about all this. Traditionally, useful cellular spectrum has been the preserve of the Richie Riches of telecom — megacorporations with sufficiently deep pockets to spend billions buying exclusive licenses. CBRS lets the factory floor get in on the action. Manufacturers, warehouses and other enterprises can get access to spectrum without first having to seek a dispensation from one of the landed telecom aristocracy. And appropriately enough, one of its strongest applications is blue-collar industrial America: private networks running factories, machines and workers rather than consumer smartphones. Power — and spectrum — to the working man (or woman). I dig it.
And private cellular networks deliver something that matters on a factory floor: control. Puskar argues that private cellular networks are tailor-made to connect mobile equipment and workers, support predictive maintenance and offer the security and reliability industrial operations demand. He names coalition members JMA Wireless, Tarana Wireless and Federated Wireless as parts of the American ecosystem. Federated operates the spectrum management technology that allows military and industrial users to share the band.
The military question is more than a trivial regulatory footnote. A factory near a naval installation cannot simply be promised permanent, exclusive use of a band alongside an incumbent federal user. One does not simply add fire control for the Aegis BMD 5.1 Weapon System (AN/SPY-1DV) on the same spectrum as a Scotchman Industries 200-ton C-frame hydraulic punch press. Obviously.
Ergo, the sharing system has to coordinate access while preserving the protection that the incumbent needs.
Puskar says his coalition's research found uptime and downtime high on manufacturers' list of concerns, and he argues CBRS has proved dependable for them. That claim deserves close scrutiny in individual deployments. But it is precisely why spectrum policy cannot be treated as a paper exercise: an interruption in the wireless layer can interrupt the production process that depends on it.
There is an important distinction between his argument and another federal broadband spending debate. Enterprises are already investing in private networks, Puskar says; he wants the rules to remain dependable enough for them to keep doing so. He favors licensed, unlicensed and shared spectrum together. His immediate concern is uncertainty around CBRS, including an FCC proceeding on power levels. “They don't need incentives, they don't need handouts, they just need certainty,” he says of businesses contemplating investment. Refreshing!
That is a narrower and more practical proposition than declaring a national wireless renaissance. The coalition has an interest in promoting its members, and its claims about deployment and reliability deserve testing against industrial users' results. But other nations moving faster to Industry 4.0 digitalization have validated the underlying architecture worldwide: the same enterprise that owns the production process can have a serious hand in the wireless network that coordinates it.
As I argued in my earlier argument about unified infrastructure, the interesting economic activity begins where networks meet the physical operation. CBRS offers a way to put that principle into a factory, a farm or a logistics site. The question for Washington is whether it will give the people building those systems confidence that the spectrum arrangement will endure.
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Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.