Rain, Rain, Go Away!

The FCC today assigned new bandwidth for alleged 5G and shared usage.

They state:

The new rules open up almost 11 GHz of spectrum for flexible use wireless broadband – 3.85 GHz of licensed spectrum and 7 GHz of unlicensed spectrum. With the adoption of these rules, the U.S. is be the first country in the world to open high-band spectrum for 5G networks and technologies, creating a runway for U.S. companies to launch the technologies that will harness 5G’s fiber-fast capabilities.

Then the details are:

1.Licensed use in the 28 GHz, 37 GHz and 39 GHz bands: Makes available 3.85 GHz of licensed, flexible use spectrum, which is more than four times the amount of flexible use spectrum the FCC has licensed to date. 

• Provides consistent block sizes (200 MHz), license areas (Partial Economic Areas), technical rules, and operability across the exclusively licensed portion of the 37 GHz band and the 39 GHz band to make 2.4 GHz of spectrum available.
• Provides two 425 MHz blocks for the 28 GHz band on a county basis and operability across the band.

 2. Unlicensed use in the 64-71 GHz band: Makes available 7 GHz of unlicensed spectrum which, when combined with the existing high-band unlicensed spectrum (57-64 GHz), doubles the amount of high-band unlicensed spectrum to 14 GHz of contiguous unlicensed spectrum (57-71 GHz). These 14 GHz will be 15 times as much as all unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum in lower bands.

3. Shared access in the 37-37.6 GHz band: Makes available 600 MHz of spectrum for dynamic shared access between different commercial users, and commercial and federal users.

Anyone who has ever worked these bands should know that moisture is a real killer! Especially at the 64-71 GHz bands. This is point to point only and absorption is severe. There is no diffraction and no multi-path survives.

Why not just move to IR? I did that twenty plus years ago. But that worked well in the desert, not too well in New York and not at all in Bangkok.