Public Knowledge Proposes Federal Spectrum Overhaul

"The current system creates perverse incentives for federal spectrum managers to limit transparency and oversight,” Public Knowledge said in a paper. “Historically, the only reward for operating with greater transparency and efficiency is to have spectrum reallocated for auction. Indeed, industry stakeholders and federal officials have repeatedly stated that the driving purpose for enhancing transparency is to facilitate transfer of spectrum from federal use to commercial use, preferably by clearing large bands of paired spectrum in the range most desirable for cellular providers.” This and another new paper were written by Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld and economist Gregory Rose.

Public Knowledge proposed that President Barack Obama, “by Executive Order, require all agencies to execute five-year ’spectrum plans’ that would set forth projected need and allow for coordinated planning among agencies.” NTIA, working with the federal Chief Technology Officer “would provide coordination and support to agencies” for the work.

"While this imposes significant burdens on federal agencies, such action constitutes a critical first step toward developing a coherent federal spectrum policy that will ultimately enhance federal use and result in significant cost savings,” Public Knowledge said. “With this information in hand, the NTIA, working with the CTO, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration, can commence long-term spectrum planning on a government-wide basis that would transition the federal government (to the extent possible) from relying on discrete quasi-license-like assignments to dynamic assignment of flexible wireless capacity on an as needed basis."

The second paper contends that the government should consider allowing real-time leasing rather than simply clearing bands entirely for auction. “This would combine the low barriers to entry and flexibility of unlicensed with the higher power and interference protection of licensed,” the paper said. “It would also generate revenue for the federal government, an unspoken driver of spectrum auctions.” The papers are at www.publicknowledge.org/node/3013.

NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling said government agencies can’t now lease their spectrum, because they don’t own it. “Federal agencies do not receive licenses to use spectrum the same way commercial entities do,” he said. “NTIA provides assignments of spectrum to federal agencies upon their request. But that assignment does not bestow any property rights on the agencies in the spectrum we assign them."

NTIA doesn’t allocate spectrum to federal agencies; frequencies are assigned for specific uses, said Karl Nebbia, associate administrator in charge of NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management. If an agency has no further need for a particular frequency assignment “they're supposed to turn them back in, and then we will assign them to somebody else,” he said. “Also, the assignments we make are based on the characteristics of a system the government operates, so it’s not based on an established boundary like a regional area.” NTIA often assigns the same channels to different agencies, Nebbia said. “We still have to look to the agencies as a whole, the spectrum as a whole, as opposed to feeling that the agencies now have rights and they're going to rent out that spectrum,” he said.

T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham said the carrier’s experience shows that government agencies often don’t use efficiently the spectrum they have. The carrier was the top bidder in the AWS-1 auction and has spent years negotiating with government agencies to clear the spectrum for commercial use. “A lot of them do the same thing, but with different equipment,” she said. “Some of them use analog and some use digital. Some of them use 6 MHz of spectrum, and some of them use 20 MHz of spectrum, the exact same uses.”

Transparency is critical, Ham said. “Transparency is, I think, good government,” she said. “One of the things that we learned is, government doesn’t have the same incentives, quite frankly, as the commercial sector, in terms of efficiency. … If you don’t pay for spectrum, you really have no incentive to use it more efficiently.”

Rick Whitt, Washington telecom counsel for Google, agreed that making spectrum available through the secondary market could be beneficial. But he conceded that could be difficult because agencies won’t hold spectrum licenses. “Some people assume that markets are just kind of born, created out of thin air, which is of course not the case,” Whitt said. “Markets are facilitated, right? They are actually engendered, fostered, in many cases by government mechanisms, whether it’s property rights law, whether it’s communications laws.”