White House Official Says Miscellaneous Receipts Act an Impediment to Spectrum Sharing
The Miscellaneous Receipts Act keeps carriers from negotiating spectrum sharing with government agencies and it might make sense to reform the law, said White House official Tom Power Monday at a Mobile Future Forum. Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, Department of Defense deputy chief information officer, said there’s “no one-size-fits-all solution” for making more spectrum available for wireless broadband.
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Power, deputy chief technology officer for the federal government, said agencies don’t have any real incentives to share spectrum, comparing the current dynamic facing agencies to auto insurance. “If I total my car, I'll get another car, but that’s not exactly an incentive to go total my car,” he said. “That’s kind of the way the agencies get treated now.”
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said it’s important to reform the Miscellaneous Receipts Act in a speech last week in Atlanta (CD Sept 23 p4) and again Monday at the Mobile Future event. The act requires that any government official or agent receiving money for the government from any source must deposit the money in the Treasury as soon as practicable.
Power agreed the act can be an impediment to sharing. “It prohibits, basically, carriers from negotiating,” he said. One possibility would be to hold auctions in which companies bid for the right to negotiate spectrum sharing with the government, he said. The Miscellaneous Receipts Act “prohibits all that right now,” he said.
Wheeler, a key DOD official on spectrum, said many solutions must be on the table for freeing up more spectrum for commercial use. “We're going to have to share and we're going to have to do bidirectional sharing and we'll have to do clearing in some cases,” he said. “We're looking at trying to make decisions not necessarily back at the desk anywhere but on the move. That’s going to require high bandwidth.” In bidirectional sharing, agencies would gain access to commercial bands.
Power agreed with Wheeler. “It is sort of an all-of-the-above approach,” said Power. “No one can tell you there’s a silver bullet.”
Wheeler said building better relationships between DOD and industry is critical. “I would welcome more interaction,” he said. “That’s the wave of the future.” Transparency in how DOD uses spectrum will only improve, he said. “We're on the cusp” of “significant technology changes” that will allow sharing where it hasn’t been possible in the past, Wheeler said. He declined to say which bands now used by DOD are candidates for sharing or clearance. “There’s probably several opportunities out there,” he said. Wheeler also said future radios used by DOD have to be adaptable so they can be changed to use more than one band.
Discussions between agencies and industry have improved significantly in recent years, Power said. “There’s no great secret other than getting the right people in the room and having people with the right attitudes on both sides of the table."
Peter Rysavy, president of Rysavy Research, warned that working out how sharing will work won’t happen in a year or two. “This is going to be a multidecade process,” he said. In 20 years there will be lots of sharing, but many technical fixes must be adopted first, he said: Getting the rules right is also important. If rules are too protective of federal bands, “you can end up with situations that spectrum is shared but it’s not actually going to be useful,” he said. Gains in spectral efficiency will be “progressive” but take a long time, Rysavy said. “No miracle will occur."
Industry and the government need to “lay the groundwork now,” for spectrum use in 2020 and beyond, said Mary Brown, director-government affairs at Cisco. “I'm mindful it has taken five to six years to get to where we are with the AWS-3 auction and the voluntary incentive auction.” No mechanism is in place for addressing problems when they occur, Brown said. Ten years into sharing in the 5 GHz band, there’s no mechanism for addressing what happens when interference problems occur, she said. “Things will go wrong when you share radio spectrum,” she said. “Issues will arise."
Brown said technology has improved rapidly with the rollout of LTE. Subscribers now get “multimegabits per second on our handheld devices,” she said. One big question is whether there’s anything better than orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) as a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies, she said. “No one has agreed that there’s a next big idea to replace that and that right now sets the bounds and the limits on where we are."
Rosenworcel opened the event, answering questions from Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter. Rosenworcel said taking on the Miscellaneous Receipts Act “seems kind of random” but its impact is “really big.” If the FCC could auction “imperfect spectrum rights” along with rights to negotiate directly with federal users, “we'd be in a position where they could negotiate out a solution for joint use, for possible clearing on an expedited basis,” she said. The FCC needs to keep an open mind as it looks for more spectrum for commercial use, Rosenworcel said. “Look low and look high,” she said. “We can’t limit ourselves to that sweet spot anymore.”