Special Report: Five Questions for John Puskar, CEO of the American-Made 5G Coalition
CBRS unlocked billions of dollars in private investment and created entirely new use cases across manufacturing, defense, education, logistics, and agriculture, Puskar says
1. What does the American Made 5G Coalition need to accomplish in order to declare victory?
For us, there isn’t a finish line. It’s an ongoing effort to restore U.S. wireless leadership by rebuilding the American telecom ecosystem so U.S. companies can lead again. We had that leadership once. We let it slip away when we ceded the industry to foreign vendors. Now, the American-Made 5G Coalition is about building it back.
As American industry retools for an era defined by AI, automation, IoT, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, factories will need reliable, enterprise-grade wireless networks to compete.
Our goal is to ensure that the connectivity powering this U.S. manufacturing resurgence is American-designed, American-made, and American-secured, so the next generation of industrial growth is built on U.S. technology, not foreign supply chains.
2. Has CBRS spectrum lowered barriers to entry and if true, who has benefited from that?
CBRS has fundamentally changed who can build and operate advanced 5G networks, and it’s the band that finally delivers on the real promise of 5G.
High-power licensed spectrum serves a critical purpose: wide-area mobile coverage for millions of personal devices. Wi-Fi serves localized indoor connectivity. But neither of those fully meets the needs of industrial and enterprise environments.
CBRS has become the third leg of the stool: the band that finally delivers on the original promise of 5G delivering enterprise-grade mobility, security, and control.
It has lowered barriers for:
● Manufacturers modernizing U.S. factory floors;
● Rural providers expanding coverage;
● Enterprises deploying private networks for automation and AI; and
● Universities, hospitals, ports, airports, logistics operators, energy producers, and agriculture
CBRS didn’t democratize connectivity in theory, it did it in practice. It enabled thousands of organizations to build their own secure, local 5G networks without needing a carrier or relying on foreign vendors. That’s a huge win for American competitiveness.
3. What’s at risk if the CBRS shared model isn’t allowed to continue?
CBRS unlocked billions of dollars in private investment and created entirely new use cases across manufacturing, defense, education, logistics, and agriculture. If the shared model is weakened, we risk undermining deployments from companies like John Deere, Tesla, Cargill, BASF, universities, U.S. military bases, airports, and many others.
And we can’t forget: Spectrum is finite. We’re not creating more of it. Shared frameworks like CBRS are the only way to unlock innovation at scale while maximizing a national resource.
Chart: The Expanding CBRS Ecosystem
4. Can the CBRS model survive if MNOs can operate at higher power levels and higher OOBE (Out-Of-Band Emission) levels.
It’s a complex question because CBRS wasn’t designed by accident; it was engineered as a carefully balanced ecosystem. The entire point of the CBRS framework was to create a middle ground between high-power mobile networks and low-power Wi-Fi, giving enterprises and manufacturers a band built specifically for industrial-grade 5G. And there are a lot of technical considerations that have to be accounted for when you change power levels in a shared band like this.
CBRS was built with strict technical limits so federal users, carriers, and private networks could all operate reliably in the same band. If you introduce much higher-power signals, they can overwhelm low-power industrial networks, create asymmetric interference, and make real-time spectrum coordination far less effective.
That matters because CBRS is now the backbone of America’s reindustrialization: factories, ports, logistics hubs, and energy sites rely on it for secure, deterministic 5G that keeps data local and powers automation, robotics, and AI. If higher-power rules crowd out those private networks, we’re not just adjusting a band plan, we’re weakening one of the few spectrum frameworks directly supporting U.S. manufacturing competitiveness.
5. Could pending FCC spectrum auctions (e.g., Upper C-band) take pressure off CBRS users?
Spectrum auctions serve a crucial national purpose: to unleash American innovation, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and ensure we can counter China and others in the global race for wireless leadership.
CBRS is already doing that by enabling U.S.-driven 5G innovation at the enterprise and industrial level. But yes, additional spectrum availability, including the Upper C-band and spectrum that will be freed up through transactions like the Dish asset sale, can help relieve pressure to reshape CBRS in ways that would harm its ecosystem.
The key is recognizing that high-power cellular networks, CBRS, and Wi-Fi all serve different roles, and all three are essential to maintaining U.S. wireless leadership.
Great articulation of how spectrum policy directly enables manufacturing competitiveness. The three-tier CBRS model solves what Ive seen as a persistent gap where neither wide-area cellular nor WiFi could deliver deterministic latency for industrial control loops. Factories running real-time robotics or closed-loop automation need that middle ground, and the shared framwork lets them deploy without waiting on carrier timelines or compromising on data sovereignty. The intereference risk from asymmetric power increases is real tho.