WASHINGTON-After 31 years, he’s been there and done that.
Now it is time for Mark E. Crosby, president of the Industrial Telecommunications Association, to leave the private-wireless advocacy group to become president of Access Spectrum L.L.C.-the entity he created and nurtured to acquire radio-frequency spectrum for the private-wireless industry.
“When you look at the objectives of ITA and you look at the objectives of Access Spectrum, the ITA leadership as well as the principle participants in Access Spectrum have come to an agreement that perhaps the best place for Mark to benefit both organizations, is to be at Access Spectrum,” said Crosby, speaking about himself with RCR Wireless News in an exclusive interview about his future and the impact on ITA.
Access Spectrum “can leverage Mark’s relationship with the industry, relationship with the manufacturers, relationships with the [Federal Communications Commission]. Mark knows the industry. He is somewhat technically fluent. He knows what spectrum management-at least with respect to the private-wireless industry-is all about. You reach the conclusion that perhaps the best way to serve both organizations’ interests is for Mark to be at Access Spectrum because as Access Spectrum succeeds, so does ITA. As ITA succeeds, so does Access Spectrum. It is sort of more of a migration. The companies are all related,” he added, explaining the reasoning behind his transition.
ITA owns 51 percent of Access Spectrum through its wholly owned subsidiary, Spectrum Equity Inc. Crosby will have an ongoing policy-consulting role with nonprofit ITA.
“Mark is and will remain my mentor,” said Laura L. Smith, ITA’s new president and chief executive officer. It was Smith’s relationship with Crosby, developed over three years as ITA’s executive director that made the ITA board comfortable with the change, said ITA Chairman Ken Doll, noting the board expects Smith “to be her own person.”
Smith came to ITA from the FCC after consulting with her father-in-law, Richard Smith, the former chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology. She got her law degree from Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, Calif. and a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice with a minor in government from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. She is married to Douglas Smith.
“We are going real slow to make sure Mark has the freedom to go do his job at Access Spectrum but he can stay and be a part of ITA as a valuable resource,” said Doll, who also is vice president for sales at Bearcom. Plans for the transition began more than a year ago when it became obvious that spectrum through auctions would become available.
Crosby “is very sensitive that he not leave the people that backed him so we went out to find a way that works for everybody,” said David Tanner of Quadrangle Capital Partners L.P., one of Access Spectrum’s partners along with Motorola Inc., HDAccess Inc. and ITA.
Access Spectrum could become a member of ITA, although it does not qualify to be a member of the other private-wireless industry powerhouse, the Land Mobile Communications Council. Crosby said he will be giving up his public leadership role in LMCC, but would like to remain a member of the Spectrum Policy and Planning Advisory Committee of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Crosby started his career with ITA as an intern while attending the University of Maryland.
During his tenure, Crosby has seen the private-wireless industry change from a time when he first drew maps to plot out radio systems to today when frequency coordination is done in record time by sophisticated computer systems. He has watched with increasing anxiety as internal wireless systems were front and center stage at the FCC to now, where the private-wireless industry has had to fight against well-heeled commercial mobile radio services operators, which say they can offer similar systems even as they target the mass market.
The private wireless industry-with Crosby leading the charge-consistently fought against having to participate in auctions to gain access to spectrum. When it became apparent auctions were the best way to get spectrum, Crosby went full-speed ahead with the band-manager concept and created Access Spectrum.
Band-managers buy spectrum at auction and then lease it to other parties for internal systems.
The maiden voyage of band managers and the birth of Access Spectrum came when Congress ordered the FCC to auction off spectrum being made available with the transition to digital TV.
The FCC was told to reserve 24 of the 60 megahertz of the frequencies the government was setting aside for public-safety uses and auction 36 megahertz for commercial uses. The FCC further split the 36 megahertz to reserve six megahertz as guard bands to protect the public-safety spectrum.
The FCC created two guard bands with licenses for 52 major economic area and sold the licenses to guard-band managers. After winning a license at auction, the guard-band manager would then be free to “subdivide its spectrum in any manner it chooses and make it available to system operators or directly to end users for fixed or mobile communications, consistent with the frequency coordination and interference rules,” said the FCC.
Guard-band managers are not permitted to lease spectrum to those using a cellular-like architecture.
Access Spectrum was fairly successful in the first guard-band manager auction, winning 19 licenses. Last week, it made the final down payment on those licenses even as it was gearing up to participate in the auction starting tomorrow for the remaining unsold licenses.
“For Access Spectrum to grow, it not only needs to develop the spectrum it has, but it has intentions to not rest on its laurels and to pursue the acquisition of additional spectrum prospectively in future FCC auctions as well as perhaps through affiliations with other entities to broaden spectrum-management work,” said Crosby.
Since many of the licenses in the 60-69 band contain incumbent TV broadcasters, Crosby has said he tried very hard to get licenses to areas that were less encumbered or highly valuable (such as the Gulf of Mexico with its many offshore drilling operations) to the private-wireless industry.
