800 MHz Rebanding Takes Much Longer Than Expected; Sprint Says It's Nearly Over
Sprint said the nearly 14-year 800 MHz rebanding is almost complete. The big question remains: Why did the process take so long when rebranding originally was projected to be completed in just three years? Former FCC officials and observers said on some levels that the 800 MHz rebanding was uniquely complicated, far more so than envisioned.
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The procedures the FCC established were “relatively unique,” said Fred Campbell, Tech Knowledge director. “The 800 MHz experience does highlight factors that can make it harder to repurpose shared spectrum generally,” Campbell said. “Large numbers of different licensees in a band tends to increase transaction costs, as does the presence of noncommercial licensees and other users who lack market incentives. These same factors have implications for other sharing arrangements, including unlicensed and lightly licensed.”
The process has taken too long and was more expensive than expected, said a lawyer with public safety clients. The FCC wants to maintain the rebanding is essentially over, but it’s not, the lawyer said. The agency didn’t comment.
Commissioners approved a plan to reconfigure the 800 MHz band in 2004. It separated public-safety land-mobile radio systems primarily from what was then Nextel’s iDEN network. The move was aimed at ending interference to first responder systems. Nextel later combined with Sprint, which eventually dropped Nextel as part of its name. The transition was supposed to start in July 2005 and end in July 2008.
“By any measure, the multi-year, multi-billion dollar 800 MHz band reconfiguration project is reaching its final stages,” Sprint said in a filing in docket 02-55. Almost 14 years after the rebanding order, parts of the work remain. Work in 11 of the 55 National Public Safety Planning Advisory Committee (NPSPAC) regions remains incomplete, Sprint reported. That includes the five regions on the border with Mexico. In the other six regions, two individual licensees, one public safety and one nonpublic safety, must be retuned. Sprint had no further comment.
The rebanding was complicated, said lawyer Elizabeth Sachs of Lukas LaFuria, who had rebanding clients. “It was a two-step relocation process.” Licensees had to be moved from the lower 3 MHz to create a new home for public safety NPSPAC systems operating at 866-869 MHz, she said. “It was only after that spectrum was cleared that the second phase, moving NPSPAC systems down to that now-vacant spectrum, could begin.” Ad hoc interoperability among public safety systems had to be taken into account, Sachs said. “It often was the case that public safety systems in an area had programmed the frequencies of multiple other systems into their radios to allow for interoperability,” she said. “This created a need to sequence the rebanding of systems to maintain that interoperability. It rarely was the case that rebanding of a system could be scheduled without taking into consideration how it would affect the operation of other systems. It was not unusual for dozens of systems in an area to be involved in the sequencing, each of which had its own rebanding requirements and timing considerations.”
Negotiation of agreements was often slowed by the need to have the 800 MHz transition administrator (TA) approve each cost item as the minimum amount necessary, Sachs said. “In all other band repurposings, the parties have been free to negotiate whatever economic and other arrangements were acceptable to them without third-party oversight and being bound by a minimum cost standard.” Sachs also saw good news. “The process is largely complete,” she said. “The largest, most complex, mission-critical systems in the country have been rebanded and, as far as I know, there was not a single instance of unscheduled system downtime.” The TA didn't comment.
The FCC and Nextel “significantly underestimated” complexity of the rebanding, said Andy Maxymillian, consultant at Blue Wing Services. Complicating factors included the complexity of public safety radio systems, the difficulty developing a band plan to assign post rebanding frequencies and border negotiations with Canada and Mexico, he said.
“The lesson is that low-priority initiatives get low-priority execution,” said Roger Entner, analyst at Recon Analytics. “Without hard deadlines and a way to enforce them on all parties, projects drag on.” The Critical Communications Association said 800 MHz interference complaints to the FCC decreased from 305 in 2005-06 and 554 in 2009-10 to 16 in 2017.