Channel Repacking Critical, Will Be Tough to Complete, Lake Says

"We've identified a lot of issues ourselves already, enough to realize that this will be a daunting process,” Lake said. “Some of those involve drawing the lines on hard and soft costs to reimburse. Another set of issues are whether we need to pay the exact amount incurred by each broadcaster for each item or whether it’s possible to create some predetermined bands of expenses, either for all costs or for particular categories of costs. … Another issue we know is whether we can only pay in arrears, or should only pay in arrears, or whether we should be in a position to pay some of the costs in advance.” There are also many issues around what constitutes comparable facilities, Lake said. “Whenever you're replacing older equipment with newer equipment the question arises whether the equipment you're buying is sufficiently comparable to what’s being replaced.”

The FCC wants to “hold to the absolute minimum the cost of implementing this reimbursement program to both the government -- the FCC -- and broadcasters,” Lake said. “We want to cover the reasonable costs of broadcasters -- that’s what we're told to do by the statute. We obviously also have the duty of any federal agency to avoid waste, fraud and abuse, because we're dealing with money that if not spent for this purpose will go to the federal treasury.” Another concern is promptness, Lake said, noting that the spectrum law mandates that the reimbursement process be completed within three years of the end of an incentive auction. “It won’t help anyone, it won’t serve anyone’s interests, if this process drags on,” he said.

Regardless of the challenges, channel repacking’s critical, Lake said. “Anyone who has been hearing us talk about incentive auctions knows that we think a repacking of the band, a realignment of the band, is necessary after the auction,” he said. “If we receive contribution of this six MHz in this market and a different six MHz in another market, it simply wouldn’t make sense, either from a broadcast viewpoint or a wireless broadband viewpoint to repurpose those individual channels. We would have problems of interference between the services, and we wouldn’t produce the blocks of spectrum that could be efficiently used for wireless services."

Many complicated issues must be addressed, including how to keep stations on-air when they have to shift to another channel, said Jay Adrick, a Harris vice president. “Changing a transmitter to a different channel, changing out the antenna, perhaps the transmission line, beefing up the tower, all the things that have to be done, may prevent the station from transmitting over a period of time of anywhere from three to maybe five days,” he said. “That would be unacceptable as a broadcaster … So how do we bridge that?"

Tower specifications have changed dramatically just since the DTV transition started, Adrick noted. “We're now on Rev. G of the tower specs,” he said. “I think you'll find that many of the towers out there today may even not pass the G specs and once work commences on a tower that’s out of spec, it becomes an insurability problem,” he said. In may cases there may not be sufficient building space or power available for a second transmitter, he said. “What about local zoning laws and regulations that might prohibit a facility form being built?” There are also a number of “industry” issues, Adrick said. “For example, there are only 14 qualified crews that can do tall sticks, that … have the equipment and have the insurability to be able to work on towers that are a thousand or two thousand feet in height.” The process of changing out an antenna can take five to six weeks, he said. “It’s not going to be easy for 14 crews to cover all of the stations that might need to transition.” There are also questions about the ability of U.S. manufacturers to quickly build adequate towers and transformers to meet potential demands, Adrick said. “There are only two major antenna manufacturers that are qualified to build antennas that take high-power UHF.”

Laws of physics also come into play, Adrick warned. “As we move lower in frequency, the size of the antenna gets larger for an equal amount of gain” or higher power transmissions are necessary, he said. Adrick said many other unknowns remain. “We don’t know how many stations will move and to what frequencies they're going to move to,” he said. “What will be the impact on each individual station based on their unique equipment and needs? … We think the transition period is three years, but can we actually accomplish it in three years?” Adrick warned that “until we know what [the repacking] looks like, there’s not much we can do to plan ahead.”

NAB General Counsel Jane Mago said some costs might be hard to project. “If you don’t have enough information, you might have to have an expedited crew in and that can be more costly than one might think,” she said. “You also run into various zoning problems. The potential for a community that decides that they don’t want to have something relocated to a particular spot even on a temporary basis can be something that can add complications.” Some broadcasters may incur costs even if they don’t have to change channels, since some 58 percent of broadcasters are on shared towers, Mago said. “If everything has to move and everything has to be altered on the tower, that can have some expenses that I'm not sure that anybody has quite figured out to quantify and deal with yet, but those are going to be very important.”