The nation’s largest cellular carriers are pressing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to dramatically raise power levels in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band by 32 to 320 times current limits. As the CEO of a rural internet service provider that depends on CBRS to connect underserved communities in northern Ohio, I don’t have to guess what would happen if they succeeded. I’m already living it.
For years, Amplex has deployed CBRS to deliver broadband to homes and businesses where traditional wireline infrastructure isn’t economically viable. Our network relies on the carefully calibrated, low-power design that has made CBRS a success story for rural connectivity.
But our location near the Canadian border has given us an unwelcome preview of what higher power levels do in practice: Canadian wireless operators use 3.5 GHz spectrum at power levels similar to what the big three U.S. cellular carriers are now proposing.
The results have been devastating. Our infrastructure experiences recurring interference from Canadian high-power base stations operating 80 to 200 kilometers away. On certain base stations pointing toward Canada, we lose connectivity for 50% or more of our customers simultaneously.
These aren’t momentary blips — outages last hours and occur throughout the day and night, leaving families without internet access and small businesses unable to operate. When our service goes down, the farm families we serve lose access to commodity markets, telehealth appointments and their kids’ homework platforms.
A recent technical study by Valo Analytica confirms what we’re living through: the power levels the carriers are proposing would unleash precisely this type of widespread disruption across the entire United States. What we experience as a localized problem near one international border would become an unmanageable and damaging nationwide problem.
Here’s what concerns me most. Our network was designed and deployed on CBRS’s low-power, shared-spectrum architecture. We made significant capital investments with the understanding and reasonable expectation that this framework would remain stable.
If the carriers succeed in rewriting these rules, years of rural broadband progress will be reversed — and the communities we serve would pay the price in the shape of a devastating result for business, consumers and competition.
The Valo Analytica study demonstrates that even a small number of high-power conversions would eliminate vast amounts of spectrum availability that rural providers depend on. Protection zones around high-power base stations would expand by two to three times their current size, automatically terminating spectrum access for thousands of existing CBRS deployments. For rural wireless internet service providers, which account for approximately 85% of all CBRS deployments nationwide, the consequences would completely undermine service expansion and sustainability.
Rural America deserves better. We’ve invested and worked hard to bring connectivity to communities that the largest carriers have largely bypassed as unprofitable. CBRS has been the great equalizer — enabling small operators like Amplex to compete and serve customers who would otherwise go without. But that only works because the carefully crafted spectrum-sharing architecture allows multiple operators to coexist through careful power management.
The FCC is under real pressure from carriers with deep pockets and powerful lobbyists. But the agency has an opportunity to protect a framework that is working — one that serves manufacturing, aviation, healthcare, rural broadband and more — precisely because power limits were set to enable coexistence, not dominance.
Listening to the operators and communities who built on CBRS before handing the spectrum band over to the carriers who want to remake it in their image is essential.
Mark Radabaugh is CEO of Amplex Electric, Inc., a fiber and fixed wireless internet provider serving more than 13,500 customers across Northwest Ohio. He serves on the board of directors of WISPA, the national trade association for wireless and fiber internet service providers.
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