NTIA Pilot Program to Look at Spectrum Occupancy in Era of Sharing
NTIA launched a pilot program for measuring the occupancy of spectrum in a shared spectrum world, Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia said Thursday during the first meeting of the newly reconstituted Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee (CD July 10 p2). NTIA is buying hardware and other equipment for making occupancy measurements and is looking at how it will distribute information collected, Nebbia said.
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"There’s been a lot very positive said” about occupancy measurements, Nebbia said. “But there’s a lot of disagreement about the value of them.” The pilot’s focus will be on radar bands since radar is a major federal use of spectrum from 1-4 GHz, he said. “We've got to come up with ways that the measurements are meaningful,” he said. The White House has directed NTIA to examine the quantification of federal spectrum use, Nebbia said. Measurement isn’t easy, he said: “For example, law enforcement surveillance, room-to-room. How do you quantify that in terms of spectrum use?”
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling opened the meeting, predicting that the reformed CSMAC would have a busy schedule. “We're anxious to get your help and anxious to get your advice,” Strickling said. “These are very important issues that we are facing that we need to solve as we continue to balance the growing need of spectrum in federal agencies and, of course, the exploding need for additional spectrum in the commercial community.”
CSMAC Co-Chairman Larry Alder, director-access strategy at Google, said CSMAC would keep the same subgroups as the last iteration: Enforcement, Transitional Sharing, General Occupancy Measurements/Quantification of Federal Spectrum Use, Spectrum Management via Databases, Federal Access to Non-Federal Bands and Spectrum Sharing Cost Recovery Alternatives. The subgroups should focus on recommendations, he said. NTIA needs “succinct recommendations that start with the language, ’the NTIA should,'” he said. NTIA wants very short documents where possible, Adler said.
The spectrum access system database subgroup has been focusing on the 3.5 GHz band, said Adler, who’s also co-chairing the group. The FCC is examining the use of the band for shared use and small cells. The Department of Defense posed some questions, Adler said. Among them, according to a document NTIA released Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1jhepog): How is government information in the SAS protected, who holds the government information and what type of information is required to coordinate use?
CSMAC member Rick Reaser from Raytheon, a former DOD official, said the working group needs more direction from DOD. Some of the questions involve things “that would be specified from the government as to how they would want these systems to behave and operate,” he said. “Some of the questions ... we would never be able to answer as a group.” Industry deals with classified information “all the time,” he said.
Nebbia said DOD naturally has questions as it faces pressure to share spectrum through a shared access system. “They're asking the question, ‘how do you intend to meet the requirements and so on that we have?'” he said. “They see this as kind of a foreign environment.”
The cost recovery subgroup is looking at how to pay the expenses that government agencies incur as a result of spectrum sharing (http://1.usa.gov/1kJ56IJ). Co-chair Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation said the group hopes to have a number of alternatives to present at CSMAC’s October meeting. “I don’t think we'll necessarily come back and say, ‘okay, here’s the thing to do at this point,'” he said. “I think we need to pin down a little better what the scope of this [is] and what some of the options would be."
CSMAC member Janice Obuchowski of Freedom Technologies said as a “realist” she questions whether Congress and the OMB will be willing to provide guidance on who pays the costs of sharing. The NTIA and FCC together could “find some way to move forward” based on private sector funding or fees, she said. “The problem is crying to be answered,” she said. “We can talk about options but if we want to move we have to come up with solutions that are going to work in the context of some of the gridlock that exists in Washington right now.”
The enforcement group is taking on five questions, focusing on how enforcement would work in a shared spectrum world (http://1.usa.gov/1zs0Mrj). In this new world “what additional tools do the FCC and NTIA need to ensure compliance with sharing criteria or arrangements?” the group is asking. “How would negotiated coordination agreements or other sharing arrangements be enforced and by whom?” CSMAC member Jennifer Warren, a vice president at Lockheed Martin, said the enforcement subgroup is essentially restarting its work, starting with a teleconference July 24, and is looking for “new blood” among the new CSMAC members.
The meeting was Nebbia’s last because he’s retiring from NTIA. His replacement has not been named.