Public safety groups petitioned the FCC for reconsideration of a ...

deadlines for public safety users transitioning to more efficient 12.5 kHz-capable equipment: (1) The decision to bar certification of equipment capable of operating at one voice path per 25 kHz of spectrum, including 12.5 kHz-capable equipment that also provided for a 25 kHz mode, starting Jan. 1, 2005. (2) The decision to bar the manufacture and import of 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz band equipment that could operate on a 25 kHz bandwidth starting Jan. 1, 2008. Those dates will “preclude a graceful migration to the next generation of technology, reduce competition among manufacturers and inhibit interoperability among federal, state and local public safety agencies,” FLEWUG said: “In so doing, the Commission runs the risk of compromising critical homeland security initiatives.” The group suggested extending the Jan. 2005 certification deadline to Jan. 1, 2008. It said that “by enabling backward compatibility plus manufacture and importation of multimode equipment through 2013 public safety agencies across the nation would be able to complete the transition to narrowband operations in a more timely fashion.” A separate challenge was filed by the Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO), the International Assn. of Fire Chiefs, the International Municipal Signal Assn. and others. The goal of the rules is to move licensees to narrower channels and increase the number of channels available in the same spectrum, APCO said. “Prior efforts to ‘refarm’ land mobile spectrum have been ineffective, due in part to the absence of a requirement that licensees convert to more efficient narrowband radio equipment by a specific date,” the filing said. “Instead, the Commission had merely used its equipment authorization process to force manufacturers to offer narrowband equipment, without any concurrent requirement that users purchase or deploy narrowband capabilities.” APCO told the FCC it didn’t object to an end date for public safety operators to convert to narrowband equipment, and suggested it be moved up to 2013 from 2018. But the public safety groups took issue with interim deadlines for the transition. If not changed, APCO said the near-term dates would “prevent public safety licensees from adding critical capacity and coverage for existing systems, locking them into current channels and equipment supplies, or forcing them to expend scarce resources to replace prematurely their entire radio systems.” Separately, paging carriers challenged the order, including the American Assn. of Paging Carriers, Allied National Paging Assn., Arch Wireless and Metrocall. They said that to the extent the rules compelled them to convert their Part 90 paging frequencies to 12.5 kHz, they would “be forced to replace their existing systems and equipment at significant and unnecessary cost and with substantial disruption of services provided to their customers.” The carriers took issue with a previous FCC decision to exempt all Part 90 paging-only frequencies below 800 MHz from any narrowbanding requirement. They told the Commission that they believed that the inclusion of paging-only frequencies in the narrowbanding mandates was inadvertent. They said it wasn’t technically possible to intermix 25 kHz base stations with 12.5 kHz base stations in the same paging system. That would mean carriers would have to “flash cut” their existing 25 kHz systems to 12.5 kHz equipment or overlay “complex and costly” networks to accommodate 12.5 kHz modes.