GOP members of the House Communications Subcommittee said the sharing proposal...

comments were in a majority memo circulated Tuesday. The committee leadership did not rule out sharing scenarios in the future. The memo said the federal government needs to “play its part” in freeing up more spectrum for mobile broadband services. The committee plans a hearing on federal spectrum use on Thursday with witnesses from the GAO, NTIA, PCAST, and the Department of Defense, among others (CD Sept. 10 p8). The memo said Republican members plan to engage federal witnesses to determine how to clear spectrum in ways that not only works for governmental users but helps improve their capabilities. The Republican memo said sharing is “less useful than clearing spectrum and too untested to be the focus of the subcommittee’s spectrum strategy. Such sharing should be reserved for cases in which federal clearing is impossible.” The PCAST report was based in part on NTIA’s finding that it will take ten years and $18 billion to clear and reallocate spectrum in the 1755-1850 MHz band. But the analysis was based on aggregated estimates provided by the federal agencies using the spectrum and did not include an independent analysis, the memo said. The memo also chided PCAST for failing to address the economic and technological feasibility of its proposal. The proposal is “unlikely to raise as much money as clearing would, and might not even raise enough money to offset the costs that Federal users would incur to enable the sharing,” majority members said.