NTIA Under Growing Pressure to Release 1755 MHz Report
Release of a report on the 1755-1850 MHz band is still on the way, though it has taken some time to wrap up review of the report by other federal agencies, NTIA head Larry Strickling said Thursday during a meeting of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia warned that spectrum sharing will be a fact of life for years to come if all or parts of the band are reallocated for broadband. Wireless carriers have long viewed 1755-1780 MHz as their top priority for reallocation for commercial use.
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More questions have been raised about NTIA’s long-awaited report (CD March 1 p1). House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent Strickling a letter Thursday asking when the agency would release the report. “The band is important to the continued growth of the wireless industry and will ensure a vibrant marketplace in the years ahead,” Eshoo wrote.
Strickling addressed the report without being asked by CSMAC members. “I know folks are still waiting to see our 1755 report,” Strickling said. “We'll be talking around it today. I am hopeful it will come out shortly. We have some slow readers at our sister agency and maybe now they will be able to pick up the pace a bit.” Strickling was referring to the FCC, an official clarified.
"Maybe what we can do is offer some speed reading courses to other departments so that we can get that report out,” said Carl Povelites, representing AT&T at the meeting. “We're looking forward to the report. … The 1755-1850 band is extremely important and we'd like to move forward.” The work of a CSMAC working group on finding 500 MHz of spectrum for broadband has been on hold pending release of the NTIA report, Povelites said.
Nebbia spoke at length about spectrum sharing, in opening remarks to the committee. “The reality is that we're going to face a couple of issues. One is the difficulty of moving some systems out of bands in the future,” Nebbia said. “We may be in a situation where a shared environment becomes the long-term reality.”
Nebbia warned that clearing the 1755-1850 MHz band will be more complicated than was clearing AWS-1 spectrum, a process that took years. “The systems that we have in the 1755-1850 band, or other bands the federal agencies have, are probably going to experience much longer transitions, parts of them moving over a period of time,” he said. “The transition periods are going to be long enough that somehow we're going to have to work through sharing concepts.”
NTIA is working to develop a database of federal uses of spectrum, but has to contend with some 250,000 government records, which will take years to analyze, Nebbia said. Nebbia encouraged CSMAC to make recommendations of all bands the government should target to help narrow the agency’s focus. Reviewing all the records will be expensive, he said. “Even after you review the data that still doesn’t confirm for you that the system is actually at the location and operating,” Nebbia said. “Does the process here involve face-to-face, going out to the sites -- 250,000 is too many to do that, obviously.”
"I appreciate the problem that you've got, it’s a huge one,” said CSMAC member Kevin Kahn of Intel. “Creating what appears to be a much more comprehensive and integrated and interactively available … database full of bad data, accomplishes nothing.” NTIA has to have a way of verifying that government records are accurate, Kahn said. “Or you're going to do an awfully lot of work here and wind up with something that’s not a hell of a lot of use."
Strickling jumped in to defend Nebbia. “Karl and his team are absolutely dedicated to getting good data here,” he said. “We have to approach it in a way consistent with the resources we've been given to do these things.” The goal is to make sure that data entered into the government’s new Federal Spectrum Management System (FSMS) is accurate, he said. The problem will remain that the FSMS will remain attached to the old database for years to come, he said. “There’s no question here about the commitment to data accuracy,” Strickling said. “We can’t have a $40 million new system and then have crappy data in it.”
CSMAC also took up a report from CSMAC’s spectrum sharing working group. Among its recommendations is that in the future secondary users of a band, not just incumbents, should have protections for their use of spectrum. “For us, at this point, to say that in creating future sharing arrangements the incumbent are going to be limited is significant, very significant,” Nebbia said. “I can feel the shaking of the ground in the incumbent world."
For spectrum sharing to be of value, “somehow that kind of compromise is going to have to be there,” said Kahn. Otherwise, no one will want to use spectrum on a secondary basis, he said. “If the objective is to maximize the amount of sharing that you do, there’s going to have to be some give,” said Rick Reaser, CSMAC member from Raytheon. “Both parties have to be able to negotiate.”