WASHINGTON-The Bush administration’s top two telecom officials said wireless issues will have high priority this year, with policymakers anxious to see wireless networks evolve into a competitive alternative to the telephone-cable TV broadband duopoly and to examine avenues for making more efficient use of the nation’s increasingly crowded airwaves.
“As we focus on the next platform on competition on the broadband front it’s going to be increasingly focused on the wireless issues,” said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, following last Wednesday’s agency meeting. “We’ve got the opportunity to have a significant amount of spectrum that the commission and government will be reclaiming after the DTV [digital television] transition and making sure that we’re getting the rules put in place to be able to move forward with that auction and to do so in a way that that spectrum is able to be utilized for broadband capabilities.”
Martin said the auction of 60 megahertz in the 700 MHz band-spectrum TV broadcasters must return by February 2009-could be conducted in August at the earliest. Congress requires the auction to be held by January 2008. The auction timetable could change, however, if Cyren Call Communications Corp. and public safety agencies succeed in persuading Congress to pass legislation redirecting half of the auction-bound 60 megahertz to first responders on a shared basis with commercial wireless licensees.
Consumer protection on docket
In addition to having to write auction and service rules for coming 700 MHz frequencies, Martin said the FCC is close to imposing new regulations on wireless carriers to better protect the privacy of subscribers’ phone records. Congress already has criminalized “pre-texting, ” a practice whereby marketers and individuals impersonate consumers in order to obtain phone calling data.
Challenges for chiefs
The FCC enters 2007 with a new chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, Fred Campbell. Campbell served the past two years as wireless advisor to Martin. The FCC has yet to fill the wireless post vacated by Campbell.
Martin’s counterpart at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, John Kneuer, will have his hands full this year implementing the Bush spectrum reform plan and overseeing two politically sensitive programs involving the award of $1 billion worth of grants for public safety communications interoperability and the disbursement of $1.5 billion in vouchers to millions of consumers to help defray the cost of converter boxes they’ll need to continue receiving broadcast signals on analog TVs in early 2009. The earmarked monies are funded by anticipated receipts from the 700 MHz auction.
The political stakes are huge for Kneuer’s NTIA, whose traditional work on federal government spectrum management and administration telecom policy is often overshadowed by telecom policymaking at the FCC and in Congress.
Pressure from above
Meantime, while he juggles pressing public safety interoperability and DTV transition priorities, Kneuer is attempting to keep the Bush spectrum policy plan on track.
Kneuer said a report will be released early this year detailing the federal government’s use of spectrum, information largely kept out of the public’s eye at a time when public and private entities are clamoring for more slices of the nation’s finite supply of airwaves.
Under the Bush plan, federal agencies must now pursue spectrum-efficient solutions to secure government funding for new radio systems.
Kneuer also said NTIA and the FCC could act this spring on a Bush spectrum plan effort to identify more government and non-government spectrum for sharing among federal agencies, commercial operators and state and local governments.
Kneuer said the NTIA is getting assistance from the Department of Homeland Security to help it meet its Sept. 30 deadline for spending all the monies authorized for public safety interoperable communications grants. During a press briefing, Kneuer dismissed a reporter’s suggestion that NTIA and the DHS have differences over eligibility requirements for public safety interoperability grants. The DHS has handed out nearly $3 billion in interoperability grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s admission that most of the country still lacks the tools and infrastructure enabling firefighters, police, medics and others to communicate with each others during emergencies.
On wireless issues, Kneuer declined to take a position on whether unassigned broadcast guard bands-nicknamed “white space”-should be freed up for unlicensed use as opposed to licensed operations.
On a related front, Kneuer said the administration is helping to accelerate broadband deployment and uptake, and expressed confidence President Bush would meet his 2007 goal for universal and affordable broadband access. Kneuer said some statistics showing the United States behind at least a dozen countries in broadband penetration are misleading. He said those figures do not represent the strides the administration has made in getting high-speed Internet connections to more citizens.
