If the FCC agrees that Sprint has paid out enough...
If the FCC agrees that Sprint has paid out enough in 800 MHz rebanding costs so the carrier won’t owe the federal government a “windfall” payment for the spectrum it received as part of the 800 MHz rebanding agreement, the…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
FCC should also relax the auditing and accounting requirements faced by public safety licensees, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials said in a filing at the agency. “Those requirements have in some cases imposed substantial administrative costs on public safety incumbents, diverting time and resources from other critical agency tasks,” APCO said (http://bit.ly/Xa9QgY). “While Sprint will obviously have a continued interest in minimizing its costs and ensuring the legitimacy of all payments, the Commission will no longer have a need to protect the Treasury as there will no longer be a potential anti-windfall payment.” The letter was also signed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the International Association of Fire Chiefs. In January, Sprint asked the FCC (http://bit.ly/ZvvL2k) to declare it has met the obligation Nextel took on before it merged with Sprint, in the FCC’s landmark 800 MHz rebanding order in 2004, which required Nextel to pay the full value of the 10 MHz national spectrum license it got as part of the rebanding agreement. The public safety groups also asked the FCC to act with care in granting Sprint a reduction in the amount that must be covered by a letter of credit guaranteeing that funds will be available to pay all remaining reconfiguration expenses. “The Public Safety Organizations urge the Commission to scrutinize Sprint’s request carefully to ensure that the LOC is adequate to address a worst case scenario,” the filing said. “Sprint bases its proposed LOC amount in part on the [800 MHz] Transition Administrator’s metrics that document the range of reconfiguration expenses incurred so far by incumbents of various sizes. The Commission’s analysis should assume the [worst], i.e., that all of the reconfiguration costs still to occur will be at or above the highest percentile in the metrics."