The FCC will soon launch a rulemaking proceeding on technical...
The FCC will soon launch a rulemaking proceeding on technical and services rules for the 700 MHz band in an effort to get rid of rules that are “out of date” as a result of the February spectrum law, David…
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Furth, deputy chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau, told the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council Thursday. The FCC will also address technical interference issues, he said. The rules will ensure that the proposed FirstNet can “co-exist” with other 700 MHZ licensees without interference problems, he said. Furth said the FCC has seen substantial progress on getting more licensees into compliance with a requirement that public safety and industrial/business land mobile radio systems in certain UHF and VHF frequencies migrate from 25 kHz channel bandwidth to 12.5 kHz or narrower technology by Jan. 1. Some 24 percent of systems have completed the transition, while 43 percent are “in transition” and 33 percent remain “wideband only” based on a review of FCC records, he said. “We certainly hope and expect that many of those licensees will be changing their status by the deadline,” Furth said. He warned that the FCC will pursue enforcement actions against systems that don’t comply with the rules or receive a waiver. More guidance will follow from the FCC over the next month or so, he said. Furth said the FCC is very focused on communications problems following the recent derecho wind storm, particularly 911 outages. “We're looking at this as a really important issue, more broadly, in terms of making sure we can derive lessons from this experience to help to make 911 systems more resilient and the carriers’ networks that deliver 911 calls to those systems more resilient so that we don’t have these types of outage problems in the future,” he said.