Strange Bedfellows Indeed..

Rarely has an FCC proceeding involved as many twists and turns as the ongoing debate over 800 MHz rebanding. Every time one side believes the battle at last has been won, the other side comes up with a new angle that sends the Commission back to the drawing board. You have to believe there’s a lot more at stake than just fixing the public safety/CMRS interference problem when Eliot Spitzer takes time off from pursuing big wheel financial bad guys in New York to let the FCC know how he thinks the matter should be resolved. All the Commission needs now is for Oprah to weigh in and make it an issue of undisputed national importance.

Thirty days ago, the Chairman had indicated the item would be on the April 15 th agenda. When that date slipped, even the two as yet undecided Commissioners informally committed to have a decision out by the end of that month. It was generally understood that all five offices supported 800 MHz rebanding; the key outstanding issues were what spectrum Nextel should get in exchange, how it should be valued, and what legal rationale could be used to support a deal that permitted Nextel to pay for the delta between the costs associated with rebanding and the value of the replacement spectrum.

CTIA and its cellular constituents seized that narrow opening to lob in yet another proposal for resolving the matter. They’ve now suggested that the FCC should allow Nextel to swap the 800 MHz spectrum it will give up in the rebanding process for 10 MHz at 2.1 GHz, rather than Nextel’s preferred 1.9 GHz, if the company also commits to a $3B rebanding contribution. Since Nextel itself had identified 2.1 GHz as a possible new home in its original “White Paper” filing, and since CTIA couched its proposal as a “compromise”, implicitly committing that it and its members would not take such a solution to court, some may have believed that Nextel was back on the ropes.

Ah, but not for long. The company’s first responsive salvo was a detailed dismantling of the CTIA proposal, highlighting the legal and other infirmities associated with a 2.1 GHz swap. However, in the political hotbed that is Washington, perhaps its more important move was a tactical one. It has forging an alliance with the extraordinarily powerful National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to support Nextel’s preferred 1.9 GHz replacement allocation. That support will cost Nextel what in other contexts would be an eye-popping minimum of $512M that Nextel has committed to spend migrating the incumbent broadcast auxiliary services off that band. Since those auxiliary services permit the transmission of images of politicians kissing babies, denouncing Janet Jackson’s antics and generally going about their public service activities, you can be sure Congress et al. will want those capabilities to continue uninterrupted. Frankly, in a proceeding in which numbers from $3-7B are tossed about casually, what’s another $500M among friends.

And what a trio of friends it is! There may have been other telecom-related matters in which public safety and broadcast were lined up on the same side of the fence, but none come to mind immediately. It’s hard to imagine a more formidable combination than the public safety/broadcast juggernaut Nextel has aligned with its own interests in this proceeding. Whether it will turn out to be the masterstroke that finally prompts the FCC to bring the matter to administrative, if not judicial, closure remains to be seen
And The Heat Is On….

While the FCC continues to wrestle with the interference repercussions of what some have characterized as an outdated 800 MHz spectrum plan, it simultaneously is pursuing a whole new model of spectrum management, one with the potential to impact virtually every aspect of today’s wireless environment. There are a series of ongoing proceedings at the FCC, all of which are premised on the conviction that we can make better use of the temporal gaps in spectrum utilization by allowing opportunistic “smart” radios to fill those spaces with transmissions. The traditional spectrum management model has relied on geographic separation between transmitters to prevent interference. The FCC now is intrigued by the possibility of developing an interference “temperature” standard and allowing smart radios to operate on licensed, presumably exclusive spectrum by sensing when the “temperature” is low enough that their transmissions will not disrupt ongoing communications.

To date, manufacturers and operators have been decidedly unenthusiastic about the FCC’s proposals, particularly in the context of trying to integrate such operations into a mobile, as opposed to fixed, spectrum environment. Some of the negative reaction undoubtedly is due to the purely economic concern that the plan would adversely affect the value of exclusive licensed spectrum. But even those that find the plan conceptually intriguing are telling the FCC that its proposals are far ahead of the industry state of the art, and even what’s on the drawing boards. Indeed, the record to date suggests that implementation of the FCC’s ideas could make the 800 MHz interference problem look like child’s play. Let’s hope the FCC’s fascination with this concept does not cloud their judgment and persuade them to proceed despite industry cautions. Putting such devices back in Pandora’s Box once they’ve been released into the general marketplace will prove impossible, so we have to get this one right the first time.