BACKERS OF 800 MHZ PLANS VIE FOR PUBLIC SAFETY INDUSTRY SUPPORT

“APCO’s position has been that the alternatives, while beneficial in many ways, don’t really solve the problem, in large part because of their reactive nature” APCO Dir.-Govt. & Legal Affairs Robert Gurss said in a panel discussion after our deadline Tues. APCO, PCIA, the Industrial Telecom Assn. and Nextel back a rebanding proposal that would reconfigure parts of the 700, 800 and 900 MHz bands, with Nextel paying up to $850 million for the relocation of affected private wireless and public safety incumbents. Both on the sidelines of the conference and in panel discussions, public safety officials repeatedly cited the importance of the Nextel funding commitment, saying alternative plans weren’t offering money to fix the interference problems they faced. “People quibble about $850 million, whether that’s enough, how that’s going to be secured, what are the procedures,” Gurss said: “Those are not illegitimate questions by any means. But there is $850 million.”

Several officials said that while some individual public safety systems had questions about how the Nextel-backed rebanding plan would work, APCO as a group was continuing to support it, with funding cited repeatedly as a key factor. “With the consensus plan, there’s no doubt about it, when you retune it’s going to be a pain. But it’s going to be a one- time pain,” said Dave Buchanan of San Bernardino County, Cal., who is chmn. of APCO spectrum policy committee, referring to the Nextel-APCO plan. “If we go the other direction with the ‘balanced plan,’ you're going to have ongoing pain,” he said, referring to the plan backed by CTIA, the United Telecom Council (UTC) and others. Rather than the rebanding in the Nextel proposal, the alternative plan would rely primarily on best practices and other technology-based solutions for preventing interference.

“We do it, we get it over with. It’s painful, but after that it’s a whole lot better,” Buchanan said of the Nextel approach. “If you look at the balanced plan, it says do it proactively. I'm not sure what that means by being proactive. I can’t predict where A-band cellular or B-band cellular or Nextel is going to put a cell site.” Buchanan said he hoped other equipment manufacturers would follow the lead of Motorola, which was working on technical fixes, such as a switchable attenuator that would reduce the strength of signals entering the receiver that otherwise would result in nonlinear operation of the low-noise amplifier, leading to intermodulation interference. “But that means you are going to have to go out and spend money and replace things ahead of time if you are having a lot of problems,” Buchanan said.

“I know I'm not going to be able to convince APCO to change its position on the consensus plan. That’s clear,” said Washington attorney Jeff Sheldon, who represents UTC. “Ultimately it’s going to be a decision by the FCC, which it’s going to then turn to you to implement. You need to be able to feel comfortable with the kind of implementation you're going to need to do.”

The Nextel-APCO plan has “too many opportunities for failure and no graceful exit strategy,” Sheldon said, citing the $850 million funding pledged by Nextel for relocation. “If there’s a shortfall, who gets left holding the bag,” he asked. Sheldon ticked off concerns with the $700 million of that pledge that would be used to relocate public safety systems, saying the budget was based on the fact that a majority of systems could be retuned rather than replaced. “That majority better be 99 percent because the budget only calls for 1 percent of public safety radios to be replaced,” he said. “If they are off by even 1 more percent, that estimate goes up by $78 million.” He also questioned how the $850 million would be securitized by Nextel. Sheldon said the plan called for only $25 million to be paid up front, with the rest paid out over time. Criticizing the plan for what he said were sketchy details, he said the funding guarantee involved spectrum at 1.9 GHz that Nextel would receive for spectrum it would give up elsewhere. With the relocation funding overseen by a separate trustee, “if the finances weren’t there when the monies came due, that [1.9 GHz] license would be sold,” he said. Besides legal questions, that set-up raises timing questions of how quickly the license could be sold to generate funds to reimburse public safety and wireless licensees for moving. “There are a growing number of 800 MHz licensees that are skeptical, and we think you have a right to be skeptical,” Sheldon said.

“Shame on the utilities for signing on a plan that doesn’t put the same requirements for those that operate above 869 [MHz] or the cellular A-band providers as they are trying to impose on Nextel,” said Robert Foosaner, Nextel senior vp-govt. affairs. “How could you possibly submit a plan to the Commission that has one set of interferers treated one way and another set treated another way?”

Foosaner defended at length the accuracy of the $850 million relocation estimate on which the Nextel plan is based. He said it came from participants such as operators of private wireless systems in the petroleum and railroad industries and others. Foosaner said Nextel’s own retuning estimates came to within $1 million of the $830 million estimated by public safety and private wireless operators, but the carrier decided to go with an even higher number. In “great detail,” Nextel worked with APCO on a wide range of public safety systems when making retuning predictions, he said. “They are not moving unless the money is there. We agree with that,” Foosaner said: “And we agree that we are going to move everybody.”

“One criterion articulated in every cellular carrier’s filing at the Commission, be they Cingular, be they Verizon, be they CTIA, is no money. ‘We won’t pay for anything,'” Foosaner said of the CTIA-UTC proposal: “Look at the plan.”

Motorola Spectrum & Standards Strategies Dir. Steve Sharkey reiterated that his company had taken a relatively agnostic position in the debate on how best to fix interference at 800 MHz, signing neither the Nextel-APCO plan nor the CTIA-UTC proposal. “We have viewed ourselves as really a technical adviser to support our customers and the decisionmakers at the FCC. It’s really up to the users to look at the claims and the facts that are being put forward by all the various parties and to weigh the options.” In May, Motorola described for the FCC advances in receiver technology, including one that could increase attenuation in areas where there was sufficient signal strength to help mitigate interference problems.

About the only issue on which the backers of the various solutions agreed is that this is among the most technically challenging spectrum issues to come before the FCC. FCC Wireless Bureau legal adviser Michael Wilhelm, who has spent 3 years working on this, said he had read 800 filings that now constituted 11,000 pages in the docket. “It’s very simply a matter of cost/benefit analysis,” he said, citing conflicting information on how much the various solutions would reduce interference. Another point of disagreement is whether the $850 million proposed by Nextel plan would be enough, he said. “What’s the cost to Nextel to reconfigure its system? We don’t have an accurate figure for that,” he said. Another unknown variable is the value of the 1.9 GHz spectrum that Nextel would receive in partial exchange for giving up licenses elsewhere. Wilhelm said the question was whether what Nextel did in support of the consensus plan was equivalent to the value of the spectrum it gained. -- Mary Greczyn

APCO Notebook…

The Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) and other groups plan to file a petition for reconsideration Mon. at the FCC on a recent decision that set out dates for moving to narrowband equipment in spectrum below 512 MHz. FCC Deputy Wireless Bureau Chief Catherine Seidel told the APCO conference the Federal Register notice on the decision was published July 17 and set in motion timelines such as a prohibition on the filing of applications for new operations that would use 25 kHz channels for systems at 150-174 MHz or 421-512 MHz. Among other deadlines are a prohibition on certification of equipment capable of operating at one voice path per 25 kHz of spectrum and, starting Jan. 1, 2008, would bar the manufacture or import of any 25 kHz equipment. Starting in Jan. 2013, non-public safety licensees using channels in those bands would have to deploy technology that would achieve the equivalent of one voice path per 12.5 kHz of spectrum and in Jan. 2018 public safety agencies would have to follow suit with that level of more efficient narrowband equipment, Seidel said. The dilemma for public safety operators is what to do if they need to expand their systems after 2008 because they may be hiring more officers but aren’t ready to move up to a narrowband system, APCO Dir.-Govt. & Legal Affairs Robert Gurss said. Seidel and other FCC officials in a panel discussion at the APCO show this week said the FCC had tried to balance such public safety needs with providing the operators with timelines that would add certainty when they sought funding for narrowband equipment purchases. Gurss said the point of the petition for reconsideration wouldn’t be to oppose the end dates in the FCC order requiring users to convert to narrowband. Instead, the public safety groups would seek to move that end date to 2013 from 2018 for making the switch to narrowband. In exchange, the proposal would move interim deadlines back to 2013, Gurss said. That would leave decisions up to the users on when and how they made the conversion, he said. “We felt that we calibrated the dates to allow for the transition in a way that would give public safety entities the triggering events for their funding agencies to get them moving along more quickly,” said Bryan Tramont, aide to FCC Chmn. Powell. One concern is that by clearing away interim deadlines in exchange for an earlier final date, the Commission could be faced with a flurry of requests for more time in 2012 if some operators said they still were building systems, he said. “We thought a staged approach would allow that to be more gradual,” he said. One challenge in that area is to make sure that public safety agencies have enough lead time to make funding decisions on buying more spectrally efficient equipment and the interim dates had that consideration in mind, said Wireless Bureau Chief John Muleta.