FCC to speed up the small cell licensing

This week was Technology Week at the White House, and the Trump Administration held events focusing on modernizing government technology and stimulating the technology sector.

On Monday, the White House invited major tech leaders and university presidents for the inaugural summit of the American Technology Council. Hosted by the White House’s Office of American Innovation, the event consisted of multiple breakout sessions to discuss ways to modernize the government by retiring out-of-date legacy systems and increasing the use of shared services.

On Tuesday, United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn held a listening session with technology leaders to discuss tax reform in the United States and the implications of a new tax plan on the technology sector.

On Thursday, the White House hosted the American Leadership in Emerging Technology Event, where American tech industry leaders demonstrated technologies like advanced drones and 5G wireless networks to the President.

The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Ajit Pai published an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union leader where he wrote the following regarding 5G:

“For starters, we’re taking aggressive action to speed the roll-out of next-generation wireless networks. Commonly known as 5G, these new networks promise speeds markedly faster than today’s mobile networks (think about getting gigabit speeds on your smartphone). 5G also promises new applications that will be critical to the development of the “Internet of Things” — that is, a future in which virtually any device can be or is connected to a network. With billions more connected devices, ranging from your car to your appliances, the Internet of Things will impact everything from supply chains to worker productivity. It has the potential to create trillions of dollars in economic value over the next decade.

But to get to the 5G future that will make the Internet of Things fully possible, we’ll need much more infrastructure than what today’s networks demand. 5G will require companies to deploy hundreds of thousands of small cells (operating at lower power), and many more miles of fiber to carry all of the traffic. That’s why the FCC is working on modernizing the rules for that kind of infrastructure. We shouldn’t apply burdensome rules designed for 100-foot towers to small cells the size of a pizza box. If America is to lead the world in 5G, we need to modernize our regulations so that infrastructure can be deployed promptly and at scale.”