WASHINGTON-The Federal Communication Commission’s long-awaited third report and order governing the further licensing of the 220 MHz-222 MHz band, released March 12, raised more controversy on the 8th floor of 1919 M St., than it probably will once the industry begins to pick it apart. The order, which establishes the rules for Phase II licensing of the band, adopted the following rules:
Pending mutually exclusive applications for the four nationwide 220 MHz licenses will be returned. The resulting 30 channels will be licensed on a nationwide basis to all applicants who “intend to use the channels to offer commercial services as well as applicants who intend to use them for their private, internal use.” Three sets of 10 channels will be auctioned.
Fifty channels in 175 Economic Areas and 75 channels in six regional economic area groupings will be allocated for Phase II non-nationwide licenses; mutually exclusive applications for the channels will be auctioned. The 10-channel blocks will be called A-E; the 15-channel regional blocks will be designated F-J. EA and regional licensees can operate anywhere as long as they do not exceed a specific predicted field strength and that they do not interfere with Phase I operations. The license term will be 10 years, and licensees must meet five- and 10-year buildout benchmarks.
Ten channels, on a single-station basis, will continue to be allocated for public-safety use. Five channels will go to the Emergency Medical Radio Service. Five of the 10 public-safety channels will be assigned on a shared basis to all eligibles to facilitate communications between different emergency officials.
All Phase I and II licensees will be allowed to provide paging services on a primary basis. All licensees also will be able to aggregate any of their contiguous 5 kilohertz channels to operate on a wider bandwidth as long as they are spectrally efficient.
“We’ve worked hard with both operators and the commission to make this happen,” commented Alan Shark, president and chief executive officer of the American Mobile Telecommunications Association in a written statement. Shark also expressed gratitude that the FCC “chose to retain current contiguous and non-contiguous channel allocations” that will allow “a choice of service opportunities.” He also expects that incumbent licensees will be the primary participants in the EA and regional auctions.
While most decisions at the commission are voted unanimously because any problems commissioners have with an item usually are hashed out prior to adoption, FCC chairman Reed Hundt broke with that assumption, disagreeing in part with the order and with his colleagues on the panel. Hundt, a proclaimed free-marketer, held that certain spectrally efficient operational standards adopted in the order were “unnecessary and will have the effect of severely limiting users’ equipment choices and will cause a costly delay in the provision of competitive services to the public.” Hundt would rather base all spectrum policy on “market-based mechanisms,” and he advocates auctions as the main means of getting the spectrum a licensee needs.
“For example, the order nominally allows 220 MHz licensees to provide … paging services but the efficiency standard we impose is not currently achievable by paging systems and, thus, paging is effectively precluded from this band until the efficiency standard sunsets in 2001,” Hundt argued in a separate statement. “As a result, licensees will be forced to make costly and inefficient equipment decisions,” he said.
