Sitting Here In Limbo..

We’re supposed to be past the lazy days of summer by now. School is back in session and fall is in the air (which unfortunately means hurricanes in Florida). We’re expected to be fully energized and diligently going about our business. The economy even is perking up a bit, but the regulatory climate seems stuck on empty with no immediate relief in sight.

The seemingly never-ending 800 MHz proceeding is in a state of suspended animation. Release of the Order has triggered yet another round of ex parte jockeying for position. Some parties hope to get the FCC to “clarify” or “correct” points to their advantage before the decision is sent to the Federal Register for publication while others are challenging those requests. It’s now been almost two months since the item was released, yet the time when the rules will become effective is still months away. It just goes to show that even a proceeding with critical safety of life issues at its core can be held hostage by aggressive competitive maneuvering.

And now 900 MHz is frozen as well! Four years ago, AMTA began its campaign for rule changes that would permit the conversion of 900 MHz Business and Industrial/Land Transportation channels to commercial status under rules that would mirror the 800 MHz conversion provisions. It seemed reasonable to permit similar flexibility on spectrum that now has been available for some twenty years.

AMTA’s proposal was bounced from one rule making to another and finally landed in the 800 MHz proceeding, presumably because of Nextel’s original proposal to return its 900 MHz SMR holdings to the FCC as part of the spectrum exchange it was pursuing. The good news is that the 800 MHz Order includes rules that will permit conversion to commercial status when that decision finally becomes effective. The bad news is that before we even get to that point, the Commission has announced it will no longer accept applications for new 900 MHz licenses, effectively closing the door on creating new, potentially convertible systems.

And the Public Notice announcing that decision caused a number of raised eyebrows, more for what it failed to say than what it said. The Commission explained that the freeze was triggered by the submission of an “exceptionally large” number of applications filed after adoption of the 800 MHz Order but prior to release of the text. The volume of applications was viewed by the FCC as potentially compromising Nextel’s access to adequate 900 MHz “green space” to complete the 800 MHz retuning process. Thus, the Commission concluded that a freeze was in order.

That explanation left out a few salient points. It didn’t mention that the vast majority of applications submitted after the Order was adopted had been filed by a Nextel affiliate. (Is the freeze intended to protect Nextel from itself?) It also neglected to note that the 800 MHz Order never mentioned a Nextel need for 900 MHz “green space” spectrum. In fact, throughout the course of that proceeding, Nextel had pressed to return its 900 MHz SMR spectrum for credit against the value of the 1.9 GHz spectrum it craved. The FCC declined the offer, but never indicated it had done so to preserve that capacity for retuning purposes.

Indeed, if Nextel needs 900 MHz “green space” to get the job done, the now frozen 900 MHz spectrum isn’t likely to be much help. All Business and Industrial/Land Transportation channels in and around urban areas have been assigned for years. The remaining channels generally are in more rural areas where retuning needs are relatively limited and Nextel already has most, in many cases all, 200 of the 900 MHz SMR channels. It’s difficult to imagine Nextel will need an additional 200 Business and Industrial/Land Transportation channels to retune 800 MHz incumbents in the Dakotas. So we’re left with another valuable band that will be on ice for at least several years, and that appears to be ear-marked for auctions before the freeze is lifted. It’s déjà vu all over again.

So what’s left? Well resolution of the remaining refarming issues hasn’t exactly been on a fast track either. It’s been more than a decade since the FCC decided narrowband was the future of the private wireless industry (just as the consumer wireless services were shifting to wideband and broadband technologies), but not much has happened. It’s unclear whether there ever will be a date certain for conversion to narrowband or when that date might be, in large part because the industry can’t reach consensus on the issue. The private wireless community responded to the dates and procedures adopted by the Commission last year with a barrage of reconsideration requests with little commonality among them. More than twelve months later, the FCC has not yet acted on those requests and is not expected to do so before the end of the year. New 25 kHz systems continue to be licensed; manufacturers are uncertain what new equipment can be certified and for how long; users convert to narrowband on a case-by-case basis and typically only as a last resort to avoid interference from full-power offset licensees. The migration that is occurring is the result of the worst possible spectrum management tool -- destructive interference.

The private wireless community needs to work collaboratively and with the FCC to break these logjams or runs the risk of finding itself without any usable spectrum resources. Without that kind of collective effort, the industry may find itself stuck in the miasma of summer doldrums through some long cold winters.