Welcome back to the Solution Series, brought to you by DoubleRadius and hosted by Jeff Holdenrid. Today we are interviewing Federated Wireless and Bernie Vaysenberg.
If you are new to the industry or new to CBRS can you explain what is SAS?
SAS is a spectrum access system. Anyone utilizing CBRS bands today has to use a SAS to be able to operate within those frequency bands (365 frequency band). It’s the brain, basically, everything we do with SAS. In CBRS there are the incumbents, usually the Navy, and they come across the coast and basically, the SAS is there to make sure there is no interference from the commercial users. The SAS actually acts as your kind of semi license backend system that makes sure that you are plotting radios are in the right frequency bands and not interfering with one another. That is the function of the SAS.
So basically, if you were a CB radio and you’re performing on channel 8 (or any channels given) and somebody new pops up on this channel you say you need to be on a different channel so there is no fighting each other. That’s exactly what the SAS does.
There are a couple of SAS providers out there, what makes Federated Wireless different from them?
Federated Wireless is basically the pioneer of the shared spectrum. Everything that we do as a company is only in regards to the shared spectrum, it starts with CBRS. Who knows where it will go, hopefully into more shared spectrum type of ideas. What we do is we offer 24/7 NOC (network operations center) support. Our competitors you know may look at the SAS as being a little more black and white but I think all of us all old RF guys know that everything isn’t so black and white. There are situations that happen in RF and wireless technologies where you need somebody to talk to, and you need to be able to call your SAS provider to get questions answered right away; “Why did this radio go down?” “Why didn’t it go down?”. There are all kinds of different intangibles that happen with DPA activity. There are kinds of issues where your radio might drop because you’re trying to associate different channels so you are not interfering with each other.
There a lot of times a customer just wants to know what is really going on. Our competitors don’t tell you what’s really going on, but we do. It’s kind of like one of those things where we take spectrum sharing very seriously, we want to make sure that CBRS as an ecosystem continues to grow and work so our differences are making sure that CBRS is reliable, continues to grow, and we offer that 24/7 NOC support to make sure that all of our customers are taken care of and that’s part of the price of when you register CBRSD. Not to mention all that the new feature sets and optimizations that we’re doing to the actual SAS to make less sensitive DPA activities and having interference challenges that don’t necessarily drop a radio. We’re trying to work on those algorithms to make sure everything is operating even more smoothly as we grow the ecosystem.
It’s always a winner when the clients are happy to know that there’s a phone number to reach out to say there is a problem.
We have been doing this forever. When there is nobody to call and you don’t know what’s going on, especially when you’re relying on the SAS to operate properly and I think that’s most important if you’re jumping into CBRS you want to make sure the SAS is not gonna give you more problems than you had before.
Do you see SAS playing a big role in the new 6G release?
Federated is building the AFC (Automatic Frequency Coordinator). We don’t have as many details with 6G as we do with CBRS right now as it is still evolving, but yes we are building the AFC and we’re already working with a bunch of different manufacturers in OEMs to try to make sure that inner-operability starts to work. As 6G evolves we will be right there with that as well. I’m looking towards the end of this year and I think will start to see some 6G products start hitting the market.
Let’s talk for a second on ESC (Environmental Sensing Capabilities). These are basically sensors across the entire coast so we can stay away from the Navy and Coast Guard, can you explain how that works and how you guys handle that while benefiting the clients?
ESC network is probably one of the most important functions of CBRS, and SAS in general. Every SAS has to have the ESE network in order to be able to give SAS service of protecting the incumbent, which is the Navy in most cases. What we did was built a very hard and redundant multiple device ESC network, which is super important. If there’s a hurricane that comes through Texas, for example, and your ESC network goes down all of a sudden you’re not sensing anything and you’re not doing anything.
That’s why we have redundant backhauls, redundant power back up on our EC networks, or every single node has retrofitted new enclosures to make sure there’s battery back up for days on end instead of only 24 hours. It’s evolving. We continue to build onto the ESC network to make it more reliable, more redundant, and I think that translates to better performance with the SAS in those terms we talked about with interference mitigation, DP activities, and faucets alarms. All these things have happened in the CBRS ecosystem. Now you're seeing a year in already post-commercialization of January of last year everything is becoming more reliable, better, and it’s all because of ESC network.
Before anybody comes in and starts registering CVSDs there are certain certifications and planning that need to happen ahead of time, can you talk a bit about that and what Federated is offering for that?
In CBRS any person that installs a radio has to be CPI certified. Federated is an accredited CPI certification course. In fact, you could buy them right through DoubleRadius and resell those CPI certifications. Anybody that touches a CBRS radio and actually activates it needs to be CPI certified. There’s a course, it’s an online course, it’s pretty inexpensive and only takes about 4 hours to complete. It’s a good course, it teaches you a lot. I went through it myself to become CPI certified. It’s good to have and we’re continuing to grow the CPI ecosystem and evolve so the more people that can train the better it is for CBRS. When we say CPI we're not referring to the security company. Make sure you are going to the right place and register for the right course; Certified Professional Installer.
CBSD is a Citizens Broadband Radio Service Device. How simple is it to register a device or get set up on your SAS?
It is really simple. Once you go through that CPI certification course you get to see how a device is registered, basically, you’ll have that CPI key. It’s basically just a few clicks choosing the right channel parameters, putting it up, and the SAS does all the work for you. It truly is a point and clicks, it is not as scary as people think. I know that LTE in general, in our industry, always seems to be a little more complex than our proprietary competitors out there. I think as we evolve more standards-based LTE, getting more simple with the different OEMs you guys carry. It’s evolving and the OEMs are working with us, everything is becoming simple. So, it depends on the OEMs on registering your CPSD because different OEMs use their own domain proxy, versus using our domain proxy, so there are some differences between the OEMs. However, all seem to have nailed it down to make it a really simple process.
This is still a little premature but could you tell us a little about the Spectrum Exchange and what we can expect?
This is exciting for us, we are releasing a new product and it’s gonna be called the Spectrum Exchange. The idea of spectrum exchange is to basically utilize the pool of PAL license winners that may or may not be utilizing a particular PAL in a particular county. Some of the big winners of PALs but billions of dollars worth of PALs, and a lot of them are not using all of them or using some of them in different markets versus other markets. So we basically wanted to create a sort of Airbnb type of model where you’re going online and you’ll have the ability to both leases your PAL spectrum or buy a PAL spectrum from somebody else that’s leasing and we’re just gonna be the middleman. We will be that pane of glass you’ll work through to get those deals done, and it’s all through with FCC. We’re pretty excited about this product and I know a lot of our customers are excited to start to be able to monetize some of that PAL spectrum that they purchased. The PALs are a protected piece because it’s owned by whoever won the bid. It is obviously a better place to be than GAA.
It has been a lot of great information today, we hope that y’all have enjoyed it. Please go to Federated Wireless where you can learn more about the things they are offering. Reach out to your DoubleRadius sales rep and talk to them about how we can help you get set up with Federated. Thank you for enjoying the segment, I hope you learned something new, we will look forward to seeing you next time.
