Saw an interesting piece on the BBC news the other day that suggests there may be another party we should be pointing fingers at for being the root cause of the current issues, rather than FAA / Telcos. If correct, then it seems that when the spectrum was auctioned off (for stupidly large sums of money) someone forgot to put in some constraints on what the successful bidder could do with it, especially in terms of cell tower transmission power and locations, that might have avoided all this. The kinds of clauses it seems at least some other countries did include precisely because of these concerns. I'd guess the document would have been drafted by the FCC, but then signed off by government - I'm not sure which house(s) though.
For the telcos, this is going to be something akin to buying a supercar and only then being told that there are going to be speed limits and some fairly significant suburbs roads where you are not permitted to drive, so you can kind of understand why they might be tad irked at all this, given the big players each have tens of billions of dollars to recoup! The aviation industry is already on the backfoot because of Covid travel restrictions, and after the Boeing MCAS debacle definitely won't want any kind of known issue causing fatalities, so they're going to be pretty entrenched in their position as well. I'm guessing many of the cancelled flights were not really viable anyway due to reduced passenger numbers, but that's still a pretty big move to make.
I'm fully expecting this to end up in the courts at this point.
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