Auctioning the D-block is “right technically, it’s right as public...

give them the D-block spectrum. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has a bill to give public safety the D-block and scheduled a hearing for Thursday morning. “This is a long process and there’s always ups and downs,” but the 4G Coalition plans to keep fighting and convince policymakers to auction the spectrum, Sugrue said. While the Senate is moving to D-block reallocation, a bipartisan group of House members seemed to agree with the auction approach at a hearing earlier this year, Sugrue said. “This week’s hearing may go a little differently, but we'll see.” House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was working on a draft bill authorizing an auction, still seems interested but appears to be waiting to see “how the process plays out” before introducing the bill, Sugrue told us afterward. There may be some desire in Congress to do a comprehensive spectrum bill next year, and public safety could get wrapped into that, he added. A lack of funding has held back a national public safety network, said T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham. “It has nothing to do with spectrum.” Auctioning the D-block will bring “competition and choice” to public safety and consumers, she said. The FCC should move forward on its rulemaking to determine how the network will operate and what the licensing scheme will be, she said. On most days, public safety would have sufficient capacity for its network using its existing 10 MHz allocation of 700 MHz spectrum, and in emergencies they could share capacity on the LTE networks of major carriers, said Ken Zdunek, chief technology officer of Roberson and Associates, a consulting firm that prepared a recent technical white paper for T-Mobile. The LTE standard would make it easy for consumers and public safety to “peacefully coexist,” said the consulting firm’s president and former Motorola CTO Dennis Roberson. Leveraging commercial networks would offer great network resiliency because commercial towers are built closely together and because public safety could fall back on multiple networks, Zdunek said. T-Mobile, meanwhile, explained how it ran a scan of spectrum use by the government in eight cities whose results it filed with the commission (CD Aug 26 p6). The scan used spectrum analyzers on T-Mobile towers with clear lines of sight to known federal facilities, T-Mobile said in a call with Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julie Knapp, according to an ex parte filing. “A resolution bandwidth of 30 kHz was used for the scan of the spectrum between 1755-1800 MHz, with particular attention paid to the spectrum between 1755-1780 MHz,” the carrier said. “The equipment was calibrated for the noise floor before each scan and utilized both omni-directional and directional antennas pointed towards the federal facilities.”