The Federal Communications Commission will vote this week on whether to add two more locations to its roster of wireless Innovation Zones: Raleigh, North Carolina and Boston, Massachusetts. Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed the addition of the two locations last week.
The Raleigh location, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, is already part of the National Science Foundation’s Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program and its testbed is under construction, expected to come online later this year. The FCC action would designate both that location and the new home of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Colosseum — the massive software-defined radio testbed that served as the virtual battleground for the three-year Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, and which now resides physically at Northeastern University — as FCC Innovation Zones, with the goal of reducing red tape around the use of experimental FCC licenses in those locations. The innovation zone designations will extend the areas in which entities which already have experimental licenses can conduct tests — so if you have an experimental license with permission to operate elsewhere, you can also use an Innovation Zone, and you can conduct multiple non-related experiments in the zone.
The FCC previously went through this process for the other two existing PAWR testbeds in New York and Salt Lake City, Utah.
The three PAWR program testbeds include one in Salt Lake City, Utah with a software-defined, end-to-end wireless network and massive MIMO; one in West Harlem in New York City, focused on mmWave research and innovation in backhaul technologies; and a third being built in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina that focuses on wireless communications and unmanned aerial vehicles. The National Science Foundation, which funds the $100 million PAWR program administered by US Ignite, announced the location of the fourth testbed, Agriculture and Rural Communities, or ARA, in June.
The proposed FCC action would also modify the current modify the New York City Innovation Zone, which is known as COSMOS, to cover the three Columbia University and City College of New York campus areas.
The FCC said that the innovation zone designations would also “help spur the development and integration of 5G network technologies and open radio access networks, or Open RAN.”
“These Innovation Zones will support cutting-edge research and development that is crucial for advancing our wireless leadership,” said Rosenworcel in a statement. “Moreover, by bringing together operators, vendors, vertical interests, and other government agencies, we are helping to spur a market for more secure and open 5G technologies.”
The FCC said that the Boston location would support the transition of Colosseum to a shared platform that will be usable by researchers, so that the platform which can emulate full-stack communications and support AI and ML algorithms, can “bring academia, government, and industry researchers together to accelerate advancements in wireless networked systems and Open RAN.”
The Raleigh Innovation Zone would include the Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW), in collaboration with North Carolina State University, which is the first testbed that will enable testing at-scale of advanced wireless technologies for unmanned aerial vehicle systems, or drones, including under scenarios beyond visual line-of-sight.
The FCC will vote on the proposal at its August 5 meeting.
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