The FCC should call off its planned incentive spectrum auction,...
The FCC should call off its planned incentive spectrum auction, the Advanced TV Broadcasting Alliance said in comments filed with the agency this week. The comments came ahead of a Friday deadline for responses to the commission’s notice of proposed…
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rulemaking on the auction. (See separate report in this issue). The alliance, whose members include full-power TV station owners such as Sinclair Broadcast Group, vendors such as Rohde & Schwarz and low-power TV (LPTV) operators, has been promoting a spectrum overlay plan that would set up a new broadcast TV standard that could offer both TV and mobile wireless services (http://xrl.us/bob2iq). “The current [FCC] plan is based on the assumption that the incentive auction is necessary to solve a spectrum crisis and that wireless carriers have the only solutions,” the alliance said (http://xrl.us/bob2iu). An auction, and the subsequent repacking of the TV band, would be “an unnecessary expense and burden to the American people [that] ignores the value delivered by ’the whole’ of television broadcast industry,” the alliance said. If the commission proceeds with an auction, it should protect LPTV operators, the alliance said. Repacking LPTV stations without the proper protection would put at risk “the investments that LPTV owners have made in reliance on Commission orders and policies regarding LPTV,” the alliance said. “When LPTV licensees accepted secondary status in the broadcast television band, it was with the understanding that LPTV was secondary in the broadcast spectrum only to full-power television stations” and there would be enough spectrum to accommodate secondary LPTV service, it said.