The Assn. of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) told t...

PCIA, the Industrial Telecom Assn. (ITA) and others have backed a “consensus plan” for mitigating public safety interference at 800 MHz, including spectrum exchanges involving 700, 800, 900 MHz and 1.9 GHz. Nextel committed to funding up to $850 million in public safety and private wireless relocation costs if the Commission adopted the plan as proposed. APCO said it still staunchly backed the plan and that, to the extent some public safety agencies had objections, their main concerns appeared to be with the size of the Nextel funding commitment and whether it’s enough to cover retuning costs. “While we fully support the consensus plan and urge its adoption, we also indicated that we would support Commission rules, consistent with the plan, to ensure that the entire cost of retuning would be covered under any circumstances,” APCO said. It said the retuning process itself was “manageable” and far less disruptive than addressing interference on a case-by-case basis. Without the plan, public safety agencies would be forced to live with the interference and risk the safety of their workers or divert scarce funding to try to fix problems as they occurred. “We made clear that homeland security and other ‘new’ sources of funding for public safety agencies must not be diverted to fixing interference problems that others created,” APCO said. The group also disagreed with some arguments to the FCC that business/industrial and land transportation (B/ILT) licensees would lose 800 MHz spectrum to make the plan possible. “In fact, the spectrum at issue was ‘lost’ long ago when B/ILT licensees sold it to Nextel,” it said. Public safety has an acute need for that spectrum to alleviate congestion and promote interoperability, APCO said.