FCC Still Sorting Through Narrowbanding Waiver Applications
The FCC’s next steps on narrowbanding will come only after the commission has a chance to plow though the large number of applications for waivers filed by public safety and other licensees, a spokesman said Friday. He acknowledged that a small number of waiver applications came in after the deadline.
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The FCC mandated that all private land mobile radio licensees in the 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz bands operate using channel bandwidth of no larger than 12.5 kHz by Jan. 1. While the FCC had been hyping this mandate for years, the deadline finally came to pass a month ago.
"Commission staff are currently reviewing and processing a large number of narrowbanding-related applications that were filed around the Jan. 1 deadline,” the FCC spokesman said. “We must complete this process in order to make a full and accurate assessment of the state of narrowbanding compliance. After the process is complete, we will evaluate the need for additional action.” The spokesman said that while most licensees appeared to have complied with the mandate, the commission is still sorting through precisely how many did not.
At year’s end, the FCC’s Public Safety and Wireless bureaus approved New York City’s request for a waiver of the deadline for many of the radio systems operated by city agencies (CD Dec 28 p1). The FCC also granted narrowbanding compliance waiver requests sought by Philadelphia and Chicago.
The FCC warned licensees in a Nov. 30 public notice that as of Jan. 1 they no longer will be permitted to operate in the 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz bands with wideband channels, “even if the license still lists a wideband emission designator.” Licensees that continued to do so without a waiver face “admonishments, license revocation, and/or monetary forfeitures of up to $16,000 for each such violation or each day of a continuing violation and up to $112,500 for any single act or failure to act,” the FCC said (http://xrl.us/bn77uu).
"No one really knows how many people were in compliance or are not -- we expect it was like 70 percent,” said Mark Crosby, president of the Enterprise Wireless Alliance, who has been tracking the issue closely. “There was a significant rush at the end of the year.” Crosby told us his group was contacted by some 1,500 licensees at year’s end which needed help changing their licenses. “The commission’s backed up. I understand why they're backed up,” he said. “I know they're going to take maybe a another month and a half to sort things out."
Crosby said he expects the FCC to release a public notice, but other steps would also help. He said the agency needs to establish a “point of contact” in the Enforcement Bureau for groups like EWA to contact if they find someone who won’t comply. “The people who have thumbed their nose at you, you can’t let them,” he said. “Seventy percent of the people spent hundreds, in some cases millions of dollars to upgrade their systems. ... You cannot let the numbskulls go.” The FCC also has to conduct a thorough audit of all licensees, he said. “They [at the FCC] know who all these people are. It’s in the database.”