Incentive Auction Repacking Information to Be Released This Summer, Tarnutzer Says
The FCC will make information on the incentive auction repacking available for “meaningful comment” this summer, said Assistant Wireless Bureau Chief Brett Tarnutzer. At an FCBA panel Thursday, he discussed several issues associated with the auction, including the recent public notice on the 600 MHz band plan and the commission’s reliance on TVStudy software to run the auction. Despite the complications inherent in the auction, the commission still believes it’s on track to release a report and order on it this year, and hold the auction in 2014, said Tarnutzer. “I believe we can do this."
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Tarnutzer said the commission’s TVStudy software -- an updated version of the OET-69 software that was used to coordinate the transition to DTV -- is central to the agency’s plan to hold the forward and reverse auctions at the same time. Tarnutzer said TVStudy allows the commission to nearly instantly know if new channels assigned to stations are going to cause interference with one another, providing “amazingly fast cell-level data” that he said will be required to allow the commission to keep up with the speed of the auction. CEA has supported using that OET-69 update
NAB has challenged the commission’s plan to use TVStudy (CD April 10 p12), which it has said shows reduced coverage areas for many stations compared to OET-69. Using the new software would represent a shift in methodology for the auction, not allowed under the legislation that authorized the auction, the association has said. NAB’s auction pointman, Rick Kaplan, called the use of TVStudy “a step backward” for the auction, speaking at the FCBA event. But Tarnutzer said he doesn’t know how the FCC would conduct the auction using the original OET-69 software.
Tarnutzer also discussed the recent FCC band plan notice, which had come under attack from NAB, AT&T and Verizon (CD May 22 p4). Tarnutzer disputed those entities’ claims that the FCC had proposed the “reverse Down from 51” and TDD plans to enhance market variation. “Market variation is the exception, not the rule,” said Tarnutzer. “The goal is to clear nationwide spectrum. It would be bad if one or two markets prevented the clearing we could do for other markets.” AT&T still believes the “Down from 51” plan represented the industry consensus, said Vice President-Federal Regulatory Joan Marsh. “The PN doesn’t solve any problems and it creates new ones."
Kaplan said before the notice was issued, NAB expected the FCC to address the issue he called the “Voldemort” of the spectrum auction. That’s co-channel interference, wherein stations sharing the same channel but geographically closer than a few hundred kilometers could interfere with each other. “The commission doesn’t seem too interested” in the problem, Kaplan said. Tarnutzer said the FCC was studying the problem, and looking forward to an AT&T study of the issue that Marsh said could be released this summer.