At trade shows it is now common for scheduled talks occur on the show floor. At the year’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta Ga, on Tues., Oct 23, the floor-based Innovation Theater featured execs from ARRIS and ARRIS subsidiary Ruckus Wireless for a discussion of 3.5 GHz band Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS).

Expo organizers named this session “CBRS: The Future is Here.” And this future does seem to be approaching quickly. Two years ago, the CBRS Alliance launched with six founding members (including Ruckus Wireless). Now it has more than 100. The category has moved so fast that most articles on CBRS still see fit to distinguish it from Citizens Band (CB) radio, the short-distance, 27 GHz band communications service made popular in the 1970s. Regulatory activity surrounding CBRS has also ramped up.

FCC Activity, CBRS Tech Requirements

While the re-opening of this 3.5 GHz spectrum goes back to the U.S. National Broadband Plan in 2010, official certifications, accreditations and orders have accelerated over the past year. As it happens, on the very same day as this session in Atlanta, the FCC voted to increase the size of CBRS Priority Access Licenses (PALs), one of three tiers in the CBRS spectrum, and to extend the duration of these licenses from three to ten years, with a presumption of renewal.

“The region will be at the county level,” said Mehmet Yavuz, CTO, Ruckus Wireless. The larger regions (they were previously at the zip-code or census level) and longer rights for PALs should boost their value when the U.S. government eventually hold spectrum auctions. “There will be at least two licenses per region, probably more,” Yazuz predicted.

One of the other two tiers is incumbent primary access, which includes naval radars, fixed satellite servers and other legacy broadband wireless access (BWA). The third tier is general authorized access (GAA). All three must coexist on this 150 MHz band, which extends from 3.5 to 3.7 GHz. The shared nature of this band raises the need for spectrum management.

In particular, it calls for two technologies: 1) a Spectrum Allocation Server (SAS) to dynamically manage the use of this shared spectrum; and 2) Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) to detect federal radar operations within the 3550-3650 MHz band in coastal regions. The FCC requires certification of both kinds of systems.

Enterprise Use Cases

Compared to network virtualization (another topic at this year’s Cable-Tech Expo, discussed here) CBRS has clearer business drivers. According to Charles Cheevers, CTO for customer premises equipment at ARRIS, a primary focus is the enterprise space.

Cheevers said that use cases could include industrial IoT or Smart Cities; equipment that needs seamless and high-quality connectivity, such as forklifts and cranes; areas where Wi-Fi is not available; and other venues, such as ports and train stations, where Wi-Fi is not 100 percent-guaranteed. Because licenses are available but not required for using this spectrum, 4G LTE or 5G wireless operators could also use it to expand their coverage at minimal cost.

There is a clear play for cable operators. Deploying CBRS access points (APs) and working with a SAS administrator will enable MSOs to reach these markets while leveraging their extensive fiber and coaxial networks for backhaul. Services over these new APs could be impressive. “Through MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) in one, you can get 10 Gbps,” Cheevers said.