LOS ANGELES — CTIA CEO Meredith Atwell Baker took a victory lap during her keynote at MWC Los Angeles 2019, claiming the United States has the first and fastest 5G networks in the world. “Because of our initial 5G success, innovators now have a platform to create on,” she said. However, others on stage cited the need for more 5G airwaves to be unleashed in order to avoid a potential 5G spectrum crunch.

“5G labs are open for business across the country and industries are starting to respond. These innovations will move from the lab to our lives in no time,” Atwell Baker said, adding that CTIA’s goal is to quickly make 5G and advanced services available to as many Americans as possible.

U.S. Cellular CEO Kenneth Meyers and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai joined her on stage separately to share their perspectives on that mission from an operator and regulatory perspective.

Meyers, who also serves as CTIA’s chairman, said 5G deployments are ramping up at a faster rate than previous leaps in network technology and identified three trends that are fueling that accelerated pace. “This industry has been phenomenally successful every time it made a technology change,” he said. “Every time we've rolled out something it’s been faster and bigger.”

As the industry has grown, a massive ecosystem has coalesced around it with millions of people leveraging mobile operators to invent new services around the capabilities it delivers, Meyers explained. The third trend driving the pace of 5G deployments is competition, he continued. “This is about the most competitive industry I have ever seen” with operators constantly scrambling to beat each other and differentiate their offerings.

“We are joining the 5G race with everybody else,” he said. U.S. Cellular recently announced that residents in parts of Iowa and Wisconsin will gain access to 5G service on its network in the first quarter of 2020. “As we sit here today, I think the step between [4G] and 5G is going to be orders of magnitude greater than what we have already seen,” Meyers said.

Early 5G deployments will ride on U.S. Cellular’s 600 MHz spectrum holdings and it plans to eventually install millimeter-wave (mmWave) transmitters on macro towers and small cells. But Meyers wasn’t hesitant to admit there’s a pressing need for more spectrum, specifically in the mid bands.

He also gave a less-than-ringing endorsement of mmWave spectrum. “We did buy a considerable amount of millimeter and we bought it because that was what was available,” he said. “With enough time and money there isn’t anything an engineer can’t overcome,” he added, sharing advice he was given earlier in his career.

Nonetheless, Meyers was adamant about the need for more mid-band spectrum. “We need a lot of it and we need it as soon as possible. Why? Because we will never get the coverage out of [mmWave] that we need if we’re really going to try to cover vast areas of this country,” he said.

Meyers was generally reticent to assess the FCC’s progress on spectrum, but he’s looking forward to a mid-band spectrum auction slated for next summer.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai echoed Meyers sentiments about the need for low-, mid-, and high-band spectrum. “We’re going to be holding an auction of the 3.5 GHz band on June 25 [next year]. We’re also looking to develop the 2.5 GHz band, which is the largest contiguous swath of spectrum in the United States that’s largely unused west of the Mississippi,” he said. “Mid band I think is especially prized, of course, for its combination of coverage and capacity.”

But before operators have a chance to bid for mid-band spectrum, the FCC on December 10 will hold its third mmWave spectrum auction to date, including 3,400 megahertz spread across the 37, 39, and 47 GHz bands. Pai described it as the “largest spectrum auction in American history” in comments he delivered at the White House earlier this year alongside President Donald Trump.

The trio of mmWave spectrum auctions identified for 5G networks have so far unleashed 10-times more spectrum than has been auctioned throughout the industry’s history in the United States, Pai said. “We made more spectrum available than is currently held by all mobile providers combined.”

Pai also addressed the security concerns surrounding 5G that have grown into a geopolitical issue. “The U.S. government is united in our view that the security of [information and communications technology] networks and 5G networks in particular is paramount. … This is not an area where we can afford to take a risk and hope for the best,” he said.

“People recognize that to the extent that 5G networks are going to be largely software-defined networks there is a broader attack surface so to speak and we need to make sure that we mitigate the risks on that attack surface as much as possible,” he said. “There are larger issues involved here but from our perspective, at least, we want to make sure that we do everything we can to preserve the security of those networks from the domestic perspective."

Pai noted that he was proud "that here in the United States we're launching 5G with only trusted vendors. Sometimes the conversation abroad and perhaps here in the United States even presents a false dichotomy: you either have to choose security or you have to choose leadership in 5G.” The U.S. carriers’ 5G experience to date proves that is not the case, he concluded. “We think we can hit that sweet spot of security as well as deployment.”

CTIA CEO Meredith Atwell Baker and U.S. Cellular CEO Kenneth Meyers discuss the need for more mid-band spectrum at MWC Los Angeles 2019. Photo: Tobias Mann