Who Should Own Your Small Cells?

I have no doubt that sometime in the future, wireless in the enterprise will work the same way that phone systems worked in the past. I would say PBX’s, but with all the hype about the cloud, I imagine many of you don’t know that PBX was premise-based, for two primary reasons: The first was a lot of the traffic was internal. The second was that the cost of owning was cheaper than the cost of leasing.

I expect that this will be the case for wireless in the enterprise.

Preston Marshall has been talking about using 3.5 GHz as a spectrum that can be the gateway for the enterprise, the industry, and the campus to have some control over their network.

3.5 GHz offers the M2M and Internet of Things communities a unique opportunity to blend traditional Wi-Fi deployment strategies with the benefits of LTE technology, and protected access to the spectrum.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission has not heard from enterprises about their desire to be self-managed. Without your voice, the carriers are advocating that the spectrum should be theirs to manage.

It would be nice (for the readers who are in a position to matter) to share that the spectrum that can support a true competitive marketplace between technologies and business concepts will facilitate the accelerated emergence of the M2M and IoT industries.

Today, that’s hampered by a lack of technology choices, largely driven by the constraints of spectrum licensing frameworks that were established to meet very different sets of needs, investment and infrastructure lifetimes, and business models. The proposed framework in 3.5 would be much more flexible in adapting to new industry needs through its market-based mechanisms.

If you want to help advocate with the FCC, please contact me at [email protected] or Preston Marshall [email protected]