Carriers to Press for Federal Spectrum While Agencies Seek to Alleviate Sharing Concerns
Wireless carriers plan to tell lawmakers that their first priority should be to clear more federal spectrum rather than embrace spectrum sharing scenarios, according to prepared remarks that circulated in advance of Thursday’s House Communications Subcommittee spectrum hearing. Representatives from NTIA and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) plan to emphasize the difficulty and cost of clearing federal spectrum and defend reports that call for greater spectrum sharing scenarios.
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Republican committee members plan to hammer NTIA and PCAST representatives for their “speculative” emphasis on spectrum sharing scenarios rather than clearing, according to a majority memo that circulated Tuesday (CD Sept 12 p13). Minority members plan to ask agency representatives to identify specific bands below 3 GHz that could be used for both sharing and clearing, a Democratic aide told us Wednesday.
Steve Sharkey, T-Mobile’s chief of engineering and technology policy, will emphasize the need for clearing federal spectrum for commercial use as a “first priority” rather than embracing spectrum sharing scenarios, according to his prepared remarks. “Sharing can be a tool to facilitate the transition of government spectrum to commercial use, but the ultimate goal should be reallocation to the extent possible,” he plans to say. “Except for limited cases shared spectrum is an inadequate resource because it is available only some of the time in particular places.” Relocating federal spectrum users is “challenging by nature” but is “feasible when all of the parties involved act cooperatively,” he will say.
Sharkey plans to detail how T-Mobile’s experience working with federal users to migrate from the AWS-1 band can be applied to other federal bands. “In relocating Federal users from the AWS-1 band, we found that fundamental misunderstandings of how our respective systems operate led to unnecessarily pessimistic predictions of potential interference,” the testimony says. Sharkey will tout T-Mobile’s work with federal entities to examine the impact of commercial use of the 1755-1780 MHz band and its participation in the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. Sharkey also plans to say that NTIA’s 1755-1780 MHz spectrum report “may be overstated” and will encourage the federal agencies to provide more accurate estimates in order to determine spectrum relocation costs. “Overstating costs could lead to a false conclusion that the spectrum should not be reallocated, producing a missed opportunity to deliver the benefits of broadband to all Americans,” he will say.
Mark Racek, Ericsson’s director of global spectrum policy, is set to testify that sharing shouldn’t be considered a substitute for cleared, licensed spectrum. “While there is a lot of interest in the concept of spectrum sharing, I would caution policy makers from being too optimistic about it’s [sic] potential. There are a host of technical and engineering challenges to building and operating networks that will rely upon shared spectrum and there is no evidence yet that business models exist to sustain them,” his remarks say.
Karl Nebbia, NTIA associate administrator at the Office of Spectrum Management, plans to make the case in his opening statement for greater spectrum sharing between federal agencies and commercial providers. He plans to say that industry and federal stakeholders should embrace an approach that “relies on a combination of relocating federal users where feasible and affordable and sharing spectrum between federal agencies and commercial users where possible and practical.” Federal agencies have “had our nose to the grindstone” trying to free up more federal spectrum for commercial use, he plans to say. But opportunities to find new spectrum to relocate are “dwindling rapidly” because agencies recognize that federal spectrum has been “indispensable” in fighting the global war on terror, eliminating Osama bin Laden, preparing for weather emergencies, and exploring Mars, he will say.
An author of the PCAST report plans to defend its controversial conclusions and say that the “enormous” opportunities that sharing scenarios present would be hard to pass on, according to prepared remarks from Preston Marshall, deputy director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. While the PCAST report may not be perfect, “it is unlikely to be fundamentally incorrect in its premise that it is increasingly difficult, expensive, and disruptive to relocate Federal users,” his prepared remarks say. Spectrum sharing is not new, new technologies make it more feasible, and federal spectrum policy should stay flexible to account for future innovations, he plans to say.