AURA Network Systems: Exclusively Licensed Spectrum is the Key to Unleashing UAS
By Chief Executive Officer Bill Tolpegin
AURA Network Systems (AURA) applauds the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) plans to formulate a National Spectrum Strategy (NSS) benefiting every corner of our country. The agency’s efforts to create a comprehensive NSS are critical to establishing goals and organizing principles for an all-of-government approach to spectrum management that maximizes its efficient use and secures U.S. leadership in wireless communications.
Our filing in response to the agency’s request for comments on the development and implementation of its NSS highlights the crucial importance of ensuring the availability of spectrum for safe and large-scale uncrewed aircraft (UA) applications. The tremendous impact of revolutionary advancements that will transform the entire U.S. transportation system demands we address the needs of the uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) industry and incorporate those into strategy policies ensuring spectrum resources are sufficient to enable even greater industry expansion.
While the total UAS market is expected to experience dramatic near-term growth, the advanced air mobility (AAM) market alone is expected to increase to $115 billion by 2035, creating 280,000+ jobs.[1] Much of this mushrooming will come from larger scale commercial and industrial UAS applications such as highly automated cargo aircraft and electric air taxis.
Bottom line: realization of this anticipated UAS industry progress will require dedicated spectrum – a significant portion of which will need to be exclusively licensed. To unlock the vast benefits of UAS and foster the transformation of transportation in our country, we suggest that the NSS prioritize enabling spectrum use cases on an exclusively licensed basis – particularly for UAS command-and-control (C2). NTIA should also examine ways to accelerate spectrum access for UAS purposes, especially in circumstances where such access is both the blocker and the catalyst for advanced operations. Our comments underscore these points:
“A UAS C2 network will need to cover large geographic areas, including the entire United States. It will also need to be highly resilient, with low latency. Importantly, such large-scale specialized networks – each of which could require hundreds of transmit sites on the ground – will need to be built from the ground up … These UAS communications networks are fundamentally full-stack communications platforms, custom built to support sophisticated, safety-of-life reliant, and aviation-compliant UAS operations. This includes the ground network, new base station technologies, aircraft transceivers, software stacks, frequency management systems, and customer platforms to assign channels to specific flights.”
Ultimately, UAS operators transporting passengers or cargo must have predictable access to spectrum to raise sufficient capital and provide the quality-of-service levels necessary for end users to fly UA over large and localized geographic areas.
It is also critical to note that licensed spectrum is necessary to enable longer range beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) connections between aircraft and ground stations. Licensed spectrum has the benefit of allowing interference-free transmissions – a key aspect to enable safety-of-life reliant communications, which is a characteristic that unlicensed bands don’t have. Simply put, the combination of licensed spectrum and exclusivity will create the necessary incentive for continued and future investment in these new technologies and networks.
AURA is a great example of such an approach, as we are designing and building – via licensed aviation-dedicated spectrum – an FAA-compliant, secure, and reliable data and voice C2 communications network that will enable both crewed and uncrewed to safely navigate through national airspace – including in BVLOS operations critical to the commercial viability of the UAS market. We look forward to our continued interaction with government and industry stakeholders to achieve these goals.
You can read the complete comments here.
[1] Committee on Science, Space and Technology, H.R. 9376, The National Drone and Advanced Air Mobility Act (introduced Dec. 2, 2022), Fact Sheet. https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/
files/e/f/ef4f6494-8300-469b-abb2-3bce289c1a6b/DA61B86054A40CFE8B82137894190049.fact-sheet---national-drone-and-advanced-air-mobility-initiative-act.pdf