DOD Spectrum Report Left Many Gaps Still to Be Filled, Industry Officials Say
The Department of Defense’s recently released spectrum strategy was positive, but left many gaps, said industry officials in interviews this week. They welcomed the report, released at the Pentagon Feb. 20 (CD Feb 21 p3), but said the report contained a surprising lack of detail, given the amount of work that carriers have already done with DOD on spectrum sharing. A DOD spokesman said Tuesday more information will be forthcoming, with the next major release in June.
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"It says all the right things,” a carrier executive said of the DOD strategy (http://1.usa.gov/MEyvcW). “They need to be more efficient. They need to be more agile and look at ways of sharing. ... It sets a direction.” But the report contained few details, the executive said. “I anticipated that it would have some more information, more detail about what their uses are and their vision for those uses,” the executive said. “I thought there would be a little more meat.”
The executive elaborated on what wasn’t in the document: “They could have provided a little more of kind of a spectrum inventory, where does their system operate, what frequency bands, and then where do they intend to go with that?” For example, “aeronautical mobile telemetry systems operate in three or four bands. Is their vision that all of the systems would be able to operate in all of those existing bands or across additional bands? Things like that. How are they going to get this additional flexibility or what are they looking for technology that would help? Are there specifics around frequency bands and the application of technology and sharing approaches?”
More information is on the way, said Air Force Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for DOD on technology issues. “This level of detail will be forthcoming in the implementation plan, which isn’t due out until late June 2014,” Pickart told us Tuesday. “The strategy serves as an overarching guide for the approach we're taking. Its intent is not to provide the specifics, costs, milestones -- etc. That will come out in the June plan.”
The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee last year wrapped up reports based on extensive discussions between the government and industry on spectrum sharing. CSMAC’s focus was on only two of the bands where DOD operates: 1755-1850 and 1696-1710 MHz.
Other carrier officials agreed the report left many gaps. A former FCC spectrum official who represents carriers and other clients said the lack of detail wasn’t surprising. “This is a government document approved by consensus,” the former official said. “It’s up to the private sector to provide the ‘meat,’ and I'm confident it will. ... The FCC only needs to know it can move ahead to auction. The remaining details will be worked out as quickly as practicable.”
Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said the report demonstrates why Congress should step in and mandate a federal spectrum inventory and encourage government users to give up spectrum. “It’s hard for federal users of spectrum to want to relinquish it,” McDowell said. “It ends up being a slow process for doing so. Under the legal structure, federal users of spectrum have little or no incentive to relinquish their frequencies and that’s where new legislation could be very helpful.” McDowell is now a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.
"Having sat in a number of meetings with the military in the early days of the National Broadband Plan, talking about spectrum, I see things moving in a very positive direction and in a direction that was not inevitable,” said Blair Levin, former manager of the broadband plan. Levin is now a fellow at the Aspen Institute and executive director of the Gig.U project to connect communities around universities with high-speed broadband. Administration officials have done “an enormous amount of work of work ... to really cause a change of view about government utilization of spectrum and that’s a critical thing,” he said.