The CBRS Alliance announced that it is expanding its mission to encompass 3GPP technologies operating in shared spectrum bands around the globe. To align with this objective, the organization is changing its name to the OnGo Alliance.
Over the past five years, the CBRS Alliance and its nearly 200 members have contributed incredible amounts of time, energy, and innovation to develop reliable, secure, and cost-effective wireless services for the 3.5 GHz CBRS band. Since the authorization of full commercial service in early 2020, the industry has seen extensive adoption of OnGo™ solutions. To date, numerous OnGo networks have been deployed to satisfy a wide range of use cases, including mobile broadband, fixed wireless access, and enterprise private networks. The private deployments include a variety of sectors, covering education, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation and more.
Through its efforts in bringing OnGo solutions to market successfully, the Alliance has developed considerable know-how on building an ecosystem, identifying and resolving policy and technical issues, stimulating wireless markets, and building industry consensus. The applicability of much of this work extends beyond the CBRS band and the shores of the United States.
“The Alliance is very proud of our members’ amazing work over the last five years to realize the vision for LTE and 5G commercial services in the CBRS band,” said Dave Wright, President of the OnGo Alliance. “While our focus will continue to be on advancing OnGo adoption and deployments in the 3.5 GHz CBRS band, our new, expanded mission provides the latitude for us to apply our specifications, work products, and learnings in other frequencies and countries.”
“Following the success of OnGo commercialization, the FCC, NTIA, and DoD are actively considering other bands for sharing. Additionally, the Alliance is being contacted by international organizations that would like to engage and become affiliated,” said Alan Ewing, Executive Director of the OnGo Alliance. “Success in the CBRS band has shown the viability of spectrum sharing in other bands and geographies. The responsible next step would be to recast the Alliance as an organization dedicated to enabling 3GPP based technologies in shared spectrum.”
The Alliance’s broad knowledge and experience in the CBRS band will be critical to successfully enabling 3GPP technologies in other shared spectrum bands. The major benefits of broadening the scope of the organization include:
- The work that has been undertaken by the CBRS Alliance on technical specifications would form the basis of a new set of specifications that would encompass other bands.
- The specifications should enable a consistent coexistence framework across networks in a range of frequency bands.
- Deployment and Operational best practices, which are now being implemented in production, would be replicable in other bands.
It is critical to note that the OnGo Alliance’s work in the CBRS band will continue uninterrupted. The OnGo Alliance will now be a potential resource to anyone looking to enable 3GPP-based services in shared spectrum bands, wherever they may be located.
