FCC May Pass AWS-4 Order Without Latest Proposal From Dish Network
Dish Network is getting a vote on its eagerly awaited waiver order at the next FCC meeting, but it may not include the company’s new proposal, said a commission official and industry analyst. The DBS company last week asked the FCC to back off a proposal in the draft order circulating since around Thanksgiving and not limit the power levels of the all-terrestrial wireless network it wants to build out in the entire uplink band (CD Dec 5 p8). Chairman Julius Genachowski and Wireless Bureau staff don’t seem inclined to change the draft to include that proposal, an agency official told us and an industry analyst wrote clients Thursday. Dish wants to instead not use the lowest 5 MHz of its 2000 to 2020 MHz uplink at all, allowing those 5 MHz to serve as a guard band to the H block that a commission rulemaking notice proposes to auction.
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The draft order likely will be unanimously approved at the Dec. 12 meeting, industry officials predicted. But they and an FCC official said it’s unclear if commissioners other than Genachowski will seek to have the order redrafted to include Dish’s latest proposal. The inclusion of the order on the agenda released Wednesday night by the agency (http://xrl.us/bn47bp) signals that Genachowski has the required votes, Credit Suisse analysts said in a research note. “Given the ‘final hour’ nature of Dish’s proposal, we would be surprised if Dish’s offer were included in the FCC’s final AWS-4 order."
Having a public vote on the order may be seen as a way for Genachowski to move the process along without delaying a decision into next year, some satellite and wireless analysts said. A public vote “forces the other commissioners to vote,” a satellite industry attorney said. It also helps Genachowski send Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen the message that “this is going to be done and you have to accept it,” said the lawyer who hopes the order will be adopted.
If there is any wavering among the commissioners “they're more likely to go with the consensus in a public vote than they may do in private,” said mobile satellite services (MSS) analyst Tim Farrar. “It seems most likely that there’s still significant opposition to any changes on the part of Sprint and perhaps within the FCC.” There’s still a lot of last-minute lobbying going on, Farrar said of Ergen’s meetings with commissioners last week. “You have to wonder if the FCC wants to send a signal to Ergen that they won’t be swayed by whatever he'd try next,” the self-employed analyst said.
There still seems to be a broad consensus at the commission that the MSS band “should be given full flexibility for terrestrial broadband, and that would add both spectrum and hopefully a new market entrant to the wireless industry,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project. “It would be ideal to allow Dish to go forward in a robust way with minimum delay while also having an H block that would be fully useful to Sprint or another carrier.” New America supports giving Dish the waiver it seeks so it doesn’t have to connect cellphones to satellites to start a wireless broadband network.
In a meeting with Wireless Bureau Deputy Chief John Leibovitz, Sprint Nextel reiterated its support for Dish’s request for reallocating the 2 GHz S-band to a fully terrestrial mobile broadband service, it said in an ex parte filing in docket 12-70 (http://xrl.us/bn46zp). Sprint urged the FCC to ensure that the PCS G block interference protections established in the FCC’s rules aren’t weakened, the carrier said. It said the commission should ensure it makes “the H block fully useful for wireless broadband communications and auctions it expeditiously.”