Administration Spectrum Policy Reshaped by PCAST Sharing Report, Strickling Says
A July 2012 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) recommending that the White House shift its focus from exclusive-use spectrum to sharing (CD July 23/12 p1) has proven critical in reshaping federal policy on spectrum, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling told PCAST at its meeting Friday.
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"That report has provided a tremendous boost to changing the paradigm of how we go about allocating spectrum for commercial use,” he said. “We're in a situation where the traditional clearing of spectrum to make it available on an exclusive basis … we just can’t do that much longer.”
Strickling said the pending AWS-4 auction of spectrum in the 2 GHz band shows the principles in the PCAST report at work. The FCC will hold an auction later this year to sell 40 MHz of spectrum “which will have sharing arrangements in it, largely sharing with satellite earth stations,” he said. “We've come up with a new way to think about how the commercial sector can coexist with satellite earth stations. Traditionally, these huge exclusion zones were created around the earth stations with no commercial activity allowed within them, but we have now developed the tools to allow much more commercial use within what were formally exclusion zones and we're not calling them coordination zones.”
The PCAST report also focused on sharing in the 3.5 GHz band, Strickling said. “The FCC has launched a proceeding in terms of how to look at making that band available for unlicensed use, again sharing with the federal use, which is large radar systems, many of them naval radar systems,” he said. “I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for experimentation in that band, which the FCC is already pursuing.” NTIA is also working on a plan on how to “evaluate another 1,000 megahertz of spectrum that we think could be made available for sharing with commercial users,” he said.
Facial recognition technology multi-stakeholder discussions set to get underway this week (CD Dec 4 p10) are aimed at developing a new code of conduct in that area, Strickling said. “We will continue to look for other opportunities to develop these codes,” he said. Codes are more flexible than rules, he said. “Our concern has always been … that attempting to regulate a code by the time you've completed it, even if it was perfectly appropriate to address the problem you started out to solve that problem, is now probably two to three years old and has been totally redefined.”
NTIA doesn’t want to provide the answers, Strickling said. That was a source of some industry frustration during the first round of multi-stakeholder privacy discussions, which resulted in a mobile app transparency code of conduct, he said. “We went through the first several months of having everybody looking at us, expecting us to give them the answer and I think everyone was a little frustrated by our refusal to do so,” Strickling said. “Frankly, it took a lot of discipline not to be injecting our view of how it ought to come out.”