In an address to the Free State Foundation, Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington continued a conversation that he says has “ruffled a few feathers”: Receiver standards.
In his remarks, Simington relayed a number of the points that he says have been raised to him in opposition of setting higher standards for receiver performance: It’s expensive, stifles innovation or that the FCC doesn’t have legal footing for regulating receivers, just transmission.
While building better receivers is an expense, Simington acknowledged, so are guard bands and interference.
“Operating our wireless future on the back of cheap edge devices that are sensitive to interference in an increasingly spectrally dense mid-band environment will be a potentially very large expense when those devices fail,” Simington continued. “I don’t know quite how big, but I am willing to bet it is smaller than the expense of the implementation of receiver standards.”
Simington said that he’s also been told that building better receivers “stifles innovation,” and he’s skeptical that the mere existence of standards for receivers would do that. Instead, he argued, receiver standards might actually fuel domestic innovation. “It’s, at present, easier to build a cheap wireless device, with poor receiver performance, in China than it is here,” Simington said. “What happens when the industry implements better receiver standards? Do consumers pay a bit more? Possibly. But do we also apply pressure to Chinese manufacturers, potentially making it feasible for non-Chinese manufacturers to compete to make higher quality devices with better components? Perhaps some domestically? That sounds, to me, like it’d have a protective effect on innovation, actually. And, at a minimum, it would mitigate some of the dominance of Chinese manufacturers in the domestic market.”
He also shrugged off the argument that the FCC couldn’t regulate receivers if it chose to. “We don’t merely regulate transmissions. We regulate reception too—logically, we have to, because interference as experienced by an end user or device takes place in a single transmission-reception process. Traditionally we haven’t focused on
receivers, but that doesn’t mean that we face an absolute bar,” Simington said.
As he closed out the speech, though, Simington noted that he was speaking to the Free State Foundation, which supports limited government — and he hopes the Commission “doesn’t, ultimately, regulate receivers.” But in bringing it up, he hopes that the telecom industry will be nudged to improve receivers ton its own.
“I suspect that the standards bodies and trade associations are in a better position than the Commission to project likely problems and anticipate them without fear of a heckler’s veto from the most marginal actors. … Our best bet is to serve as a clearinghouse to encourage industry coordination and autoregulation,” he said. “But I do think that the specter of regulation, from time to time, must loom in order to help industry act; eventually, either this issue will be solved, or the Commission’s hand will be forced by public opinion, which is not the best way to get nuanced, thoughtful, capacious regulation. And so, for the good of the American people and to deliver on the promise of our wireless future, we must raise the question with industry.”
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