BIB092 – 6Ghz Wireless Spectrum, Unlicensed Access with US FCC - a podcast by Packet Pushers Interactive, LLC

The US FCC has announced its intention to release the 6Ghz spectrum for unlicensed use in an upcoming vote. This is surprising since its most often sold to the highest bidder for large sums.

I spoke with Keith Parsons who is deeply involved in the process and years of experience on the process to find out more.

You can find Keith on the Internet: 

Twitter @keithrparsons

Wireless LAN Professionals – https://www.wlanpros.com/homepage/

Transcript

This transcript is automagically generated and is about 90% accurate. Not much we can do about that.

Greg Ferro: [00:00:05] Welcome to Briefings In Brief an audio digest of it, news and information from the packet pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research and commentary. I’m Greg Ferro, your host from Packet Pushers. It’s the 7th of April, 2020 and here’s what’s happening. I’m speaking with Keith Parsons, a well known wireless expert and well respected throughout the industry for his awareness and knowledge of what’s going on.

To talk about the recent announcement by the U S government regulatory body, the FCC, and releasing the six gigahertz spectrum soon to be voted on, but looking pretty certain to go ahead and what it means for us in the wireless industry.

Well, thanks very much for joining us, Keith. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our 

Keith Parsons: [00:00:39] audience. Hi, my name is Keith Parsons on Twitter. I’m Keith R. Parsons. I run a little company called wireless land professionals. We do wifi. So we, we teach probably two, 250 classes a year on how to design efficient wifi as well as we sponsor and host the wireless and professionals conference.

So I kind of [00:01:00] live in the wifi world. 

Greg Ferro: [00:01:01] You have been for a long time and you’re quite well known in the industry generally because you’ve been, so active in the industry over the years

so the reason I asked Keith on the show was that the FCC in the USA, they’ve got the, which is the body and the L of the U S government, which handles the allocators and respect of recently, voted to release the six gigahertz spectrum for use by wifi or wireless networking. Now, this is not something that was expected.

This was expected to sort of sit in a purgatory for months and months while there was political battles and processes and to become after. Was it surprising to see this announced so fast or am I on the wrong track there? 

Keith Parsons: [00:01:36] well, first, just, just a little clarification. They didn’t announce it. The vote, the vote isn’t until April 23rd, so the vote hasn’t taken place.

This is not an official FCC thing, but the chairman as well as a couple of other people, on both, on Twitter and they, they did do a public release, a press release saying they want. To have it. So they kind of publicly said, we plan on doing this, [00:02:00] but the official votes not for a couple more weeks. And what they’re talking about is opening up a massive amount of frequency, like close to triple what we have today.

That’s a huge amount of more frequency. And in wifi, the, the limiting constraint we have is spectrum. And so the spectrum we’ve been bumping up against for a long time is now open. And we’re looking at a huge change in what we can pull off as wifi professionals. 

Greg Ferro: [00:02:27]   but six gigahertz is way up in the spectrum.

Today we’re doing wireless in the, the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum is largely well retired by enlarge. The five gigahertz is where most of the , wifi, five wifi, six action is six gigahertz is what going to be part of wifi. Six wifi seven and  at six gigahertz.  

Keith Parsons: [00:02:46] Yeah. No. So what,

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