Government Determined to Develop Better Snapshot of Agency Spectrum Use, Power Says
The administration’s ongoing process for assessing the spectrum that federal agencies are actively deploying through a quantitative assessment of their spectrum use is “narrower, but deeper” than a generic spectrum inventory would be, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Tom Power said at a Wireless Spectrum Research and Development conference Monday. He also said the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) likely will post on Tuesday comments filed last month (CD March 24 p8) in response to a Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) report identifying approaches to providing incentives to federal agencies to share or relinquish spectrum (http://bit.ly/1oG93Br).
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In just the 1755-1780 MHz band targeted for commercial use “there are like 800 federal systems operating,” Power said. “If you wanted to say, how much spectrum is being used, if you multiply 800 systems by 25 MHz, they're using 20,000 MHz of spectrum.” But in that 25 megahertz there is lots of sharing between agencies. The administration needs to examine “what does that usage actually look like, how encumbered is that band,” said Power. “You can’t just look at an inventory as sort of like a street map of where people live, like a real estate plat, because it’s much more complex than that."
At the White House’s direction, NTIA is developing metrics and parameters to guide future decisions on which federal bands can be shared with commercial users, Power said. “If for whatever reason you know the spectrum either is not going to be useful for the commercial sector, or it’s just really not capable of relocation or sharing, for whatever reason, there’s really no reason to spend a lot of time” on a band, Power said.
Federal agencies will complete quantitative assessments of their spectrum use and submit their reports to NTIA, Power said. The assessments will “further inform the process for next steps for freeing up spectrum for commercial use,” he said. The administration will also require agencies to include data on actual usage when they seek renewal of spectrum assignments, he said. “That’s a staggered process, so it just depends on whenever the assignment was made,” he said. “But eventually you can get all these pieces together to give us the best picture we've had of federal spectrum usage.”
Power said much of the spectrum used by federal agencies can’t be cleared. He contrasted sharing with clearing. “You find the band or bands that the commercial sector finds the most appealing ... and just lift out all those federal systems and move off the band somewhere, plop them down over here,” he said. “That’s great if you can pull it off, but it’s very costly to uproot a whole bunch of systems and it takes a lot of time, but that’s not in anyone’s interest.”
Dale Hatfield, senior fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center, said more intense use of the spectrum means the government needs to improve how it addresses interference. Hatfield is former chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology and acting NTIA administrator.
Continuing growth in demand for spectrum “is producing increasing densification which, in turn, increases the risk of disruptive and harmful interference,” Hatfield said. “The increased value of the radio spectrum resource will put additional pressure on both the FCC and the NTIA and other government agencies ... to appropriately protect the radio spectrum resource and, in particular, to more quickly and effectively resolve cases of interference when they do arise.”
Hatfield said the government faces new challenges in detecting, identifying, locating, mitigating and reporting interference incidents. “These challenges have been exacerbated by the wider availability of illegal devices capable of jamming or otherwise disrupting wireless systems that are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure,” he said. “One of the things that’s caused me to lose a lot of sleep at night is this issue of intentional ... jamming.” Hatfield noted that ultimately the willingness of government agencies to share spectrum “depends upon trust,” he said. “I as an investor will be hesitant to invest in spectrum if I have doubts about whether I will be protected from ... interference.” Federal agencies have the same concerns, he said.