Some of the nation’s largest cellular carriers and their allies are urging the Federal Communications Commission to dramatically raise power levels in the 3.5 GHz band, claiming that a new auction framework could unlock tens of billions for the Treasury. The FCC should reject this proposal outright.
My new technical analysis shows that the promised gains would come at a devastating cost to the over one thousand operators who depend on this band today. Significant impacts include a 1,000-fold degradation of throughput at American manufacturing facilities, the loss of nearly a third of network capacity at a major international airport, and repeated broadband outages in rural communities with no alternative means to gain internet access.
The 3.5 GHz band is home to the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which represents something revolutionary in telecommunications: a successful implementation of dynamic spectrum sharing.
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For six years, Fortune 500 manufacturers, rural internet providers, utilities, airports, and others have used CBRS to automate factory floors, power precision agriculture, handle airport baggage systems, and deliver broadband access to schools, homes, and small businesses. All of this happens on the same spectrum, with no interference with each other or with the critical military systems that also occupy the band.
This isn’t luck. It’s engineering.
The CBRS band was deliberately designed with low-power, small-cell architecture to maximize spectrum use and user density. Lower power limits mean greater spatial reuse, allowing more operators to thrive in the same geographic area without stepping on each other’s toes.
Critics call this a “mismatch” with adjacent high-power bands. However, it’s the design’s core strength and the proposals that call on the FCC to raise allowable power by 32 to 320 times current limits would fundamentally dismantle the small-cell architecture that makes this sharing possible.
Think of it this way: A macro-cellular tower is like a megaphone in a crowded restaurant. The person with the megaphone can be heard clearly, but everyone else must stop talking because the background noise becomes overwhelming. The entire room breaks down.
Even a small number of higher-power deployments would cause interference cascading across the entire band. Base stations are the equipment that transmit and receive LTE and 5G signals across the band. If just over 1% of them converted to the proposed power levels, the result would be a loss of capacity equivalent to 180,000 simultaneous 4K video streams for critical operations such as computer vision on assembly lines and airport ramps.
At John Deere’s manufacturing facilities in Illinois and Iowa, engineers have built systems that work within current power limits: powering autonomous mobile robots, computer vision on manufacturing lines, and logistics networks across millions of square feet. If higher power levels were allowed, Deere’s campus network coverage would collapse to the radius of what a pair of Bluetooth headphones uses. The company’s own Technology Architect has called the possible impact “catastrophic.”
Miami International Airport faces a similar threat. The airport’s CBRS network handles video surveillance, baggage systems, customs processing, and public safety communications across its 3,230-acre property. Higher-power operations would eliminate nearly a third of the airport’s network capacity if just one high-power device began operating in the area. Airport engineers have called such a loss devastating to their operations.
This isn’t speculative. Near the Canadian border, wireless internet provider Amplex operates CBRS networks already exposed to Canadian high-power operations on the same frequencies. The result: repeated outages affecting half or more of customers on affected base stations, caused by interference from transmitters up to 200 kilometers away.
The current framework attracted thousands of operators and hundreds of millions in private capital precisely because it rewards competitive access over spectrum concentration. Regulatory certainty over the band’s future would accelerate that investment significantly — uncertainty does the opposite. Changing the rules now would strand existing deployments and freeze the very innovation the band was designed to foster.
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What makes this moment particularly urgent is the scale of investment already deployed in critical sectors. Manufacturers have automated entire facilities around CBRS. Airports have built public safety and security networks on it. Rural communities have finally gained access to broadband. Utilities, schools, hospitals, and agricultural operations depend on it. These are not pilot programs — they are just a few of the more than 1,000 operators that employ more than 430,000 base stations for active deployments, creating tangible economic value. Upending the rules now means telling every one of those operators that the framework they built on no longer applies.
CBRS succeeded because it resisted the temptation to let a few dominant players dictate the terms. The technical evidence is clear: Raising power levels would not unlock value — it would destroy it. The commission should protect the framework that lets a thousand companies compete and innovate — not sacrifice it for a few louder signals.
Andrew Clegg is co-founder of Valo Analytica and a senior research scientist at Baylor University who previously led spectrum engineering at Google and helped develop the CBRS framework.