by Aileen Ryan, RAIN Alliance President & CEO

The deadline for comments to the NextNav petition is September 5th at 11:59 pm US Eastern, and I know many of our members are in the process of finalizing their comments.

The RAIN Alliance has been providing guidance to our members on this matter since late July, and last week, our friends at RFID Journal published an Expert View I wrote on the subject of Defending Supply Chain Resilience in the US: The Power of Community.

In that article, I outlined that, if the petition were approved, the result would be significant interference – in-band and out-of-band emissions jamming receivers for all types of devices – which would profoundly impact the countless Part 15 devices including RAIN RFID. In fact, the power levels that NextNav proposes would cause such notable interference that it would render RAIN RFID operation impossible in the United States.

Today, as we approach the FCC deadline for comments, I want to provide some quantification of just some of the interference and impacts.

  1. NextNav base stations will cause significant interference with RAIN RFID Readers which are within ~14 kilometers in rural areas or within ~11 kilometers in urban areas, rendering RAIN RFID deployments unusable.
  2. RAIN RFID deployments of a single RAIN reader will interfere with NextNav mobiles located within 1 kilometer. The NextNav rule-making petition requests that they would have preferential treatment, which would mean that these interfering RAIN RFID deployments would be shut down.

Click here to see a preliminary analysis. 

In my RFID Journal article, I spoke about the Power of Community. I am enormously grateful to the community of members who have done the heavy lifting of calculating and reviewing the impacts on behalf of the RAIN Alliance membership.

As we approach the deadline of 5th September, I exhort our community of members to use this information and lend the power of your voice to the RAIN RFID ecosystem by ensuring your comments are filed on time.

If your company is not yet a member of the RAIN Alliance, the time to join is NOW! Together we are stronger!