PCAST Confirms NTIA Push for Sharing Over Exclusive Use Spectrum, Strickling Says

"We need to find a new way of making spectrum available for commercial broadband and that new way has to embrace the sharing of spectrum between federal agencies and industry,” Strickling said. “Spectrum sharing is now critical to solving and satisfying the nation’s long-term needs for more spectrum for commercial broadband.” The government and industry must explore various iterations of sharing, he said: “We should not constrain technology development by picking one solution or picking one solution too soon.”

Collaboration, especially between industry and the government, will be critical, Strickling said. “We need to get the experts together, we need to work collaboratively, we need to come up with these solutions and then really work to execute and implement them,” he said. “Our challenge today, and I literally mean today and tomorrow at this conference, but also in the weeks and months to come, is to come up with the framework within which to move forward on this important issue.”

Strickling discussed NTIA’s report on the 1755-1850 MHz band, which found it would take at least 10 years and cost at least $18 billion to clear the band of federal users (CD March 1 p1). “Granted, these are preliminary numbers, but you can discount them however you want, and I think you still come up with the conclusion that this is going to take too long and cost too much to do a complete relocation of these systems,” he said.

Strickling said some federal users of the 1755 MHz band may still be relocated to other spectrum. “Point-to-point microwave is a good example of that, it’s a pretty straightforward system to relocate and we have spectrum to which we can relocate those systems,” he said. “In other cases, like the satellite earth stations, we'll probably be looking at defining geographic exclusion zones. ... But now, as a result of our work, we're going to add a third option to the discussion and that’s the possibility that industry and agencies can both use spectrum in the same geographies.” The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee is looking at a range of options, with recommendations likely to be finalized in early 2013, he said. “We cannot let the technical and practical complexity of this challenge be used as a reason for not aggressively and wholeheartedly confronting and solving these issues as quickly as we can,” he said. “We are at an historical and critical junction in terms of spectrum management and spectrum allocation.”

Strickling also said last week’s killings at a movie theater in nearby Aurora, Colo., shows the importance of FirstNet, the national wireless network for first responders. The Denver Post published a transcript Wednesday of the dispatch tapes from the Aurora Police and Fire departments from the minutes after the shooting, which showed some communications breakdowns among first responders (http://xrl.us/bnh7jh).

NTIA has a big job ahead in launching the network, Strickling said. “All Congress gave us is 20 pages on instructions as to how to pick the board, $7 billion and 20 MHz of spectrum, and they said, ‘You all fill in the blanks,’ which we're trying to do.” Strickling said, as he read the communications transcripts in the newspapers Wednesday from the Aurora shooting spree, he was struck by “the possibility, the opportunity that we have at NTIA and many of you will have” to develop a network that will “hopefully allow responses to future tragedies and disasters to be done as seamlessly and as promptly and as efficiently as they can.” What happened in Aurora should “hit home,” he said. “This is an immense problem that we haven’t solved in this country for the last more than 10 years and now we have a terrific opportunity to do so and I'm very pleased and proud that NTIA is going to take a major role in that."

Joe Hersey, chief of the U.S. Coast Guard Spectrum Management and Telecommunication Policy Division, said on an ISART panel he remains skeptical. “I think sharing is going to have to work a whole lot better than it’s working now,” Hersey said. Hersey encouraged other federal spectrum managers to read the PCAST report. “There’s a lot of good stuff there,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that may be impossible to achieve, but that we'll have to work on.” One question that remains is whether the PCAST report has “political legs,” he said. “Maybe it’s just too soon to know that. Is this going to be the policy of the country? ... Is this policy we're going to have follow or is this going to be competing with something else?”

Transparency and the ability to share data on spectrum is one key to sharing, Hersey said. “On the federal side we're hindered not only by classification but ... by our official use-only privacy limitations, which is really keeping us from getting data out,” he said. Commercial licensees as well are “reluctant to share their data for commercial reasons,” he said. “They don’t share how they use their radio assignments either."

"I see other federal agencies sharing more in the future,” said James Craig, Justice Department senior adviser on spectrum. “I see a change in how the federal agencies approach sharing. I think they'll be more open because I really don’t think they'll have a choice.” Craig said DOJ has already been able to move some of its narrowband voice and video surveillance operations to commercial networks. “There’s no one solution for us,” he said. “It’s going to be a combination of public safety broadband, LTE, commercial and government spectrum for us. That’s where I see us going.”

Sharing works, but it takes too long, said Tom Kidd, director of strategic spectrum policy with the U.S. Navy. “We just need to figure out how to speed these processes up,” he said. “We're going to be looking at coordination processes that are faster in orders of magnitude. ... The technology will demand it.” The Defense Department requires “levels of reliability that are far above what would be necessary for you or I to have [from] a commercial system,” he said.

The military is reluctant to even consider a move of some of its systems to commercial networks, Kidd said. Kidd said if he exits a subway system and it takes him a minute to load Google Maps, it’s not a big deal. “If there’s a handful of [war fighters] who are trying to take a hill and they go to bring up their map and it doesn’t come up, and they're sitting there under fire exposed and they're having to figure out how to reboot their system, whether this is a reality or just a perception this is one of the challenges we're up against,” he said.

"Most spectrum managers are radio scientists and they are just now learning the potential, both good and bad, of software defined-radio,” said Eric Nelson, an NTIA engineer who opened Wednesday’s session. “Modifying radio systems in the field to address interference problems is time consuming and costly, so radio engineers try to figure all these things out upfront to address the potential problems in advance before systems are deployed. But now computer scientists have empowered radio systems with the ability to easily adapt ... not just with new modulations but with new policies and new behaviors.”