Developing Administration Spectrum Strategy Won't Be Easy; Top NTIA Spectrum Official Leaving

“What we’re hoping comes out of this is we wanted to put out a clear statement of what NTIA is working on,” said Administrator David Redl in an interview. “Our focus is on bringing all the tools to the table,” he said. “That includes taking what we have to do in Mobile Now and learning lessons there. It means hopefully getting the leasing authority that the president put in his [FY 2019] budget brought to the table.”

Finding more spectrum for broadband won’t get easier, Redl said. “This is going to be a complicated challenge and it’s going to get more complicated every time,” he said. “Hopefully for us, this will be a rallying cry … to make sure everything is brought to bear on the challenge,” he said. “My job is going to get harder every day.” Federal spectrum demands are also on the rise, he said. “We’re asking the U.S. government to do more with less and that’s going to get more complicated.”

Redl is looking for the advent of the more sophisticated sharing system devised for the 3.5 GHz band as a way of improving sharing. “That’s a real development that will make these challenges not easier, not harder, but different,” he said. “It will give us another way to say 'yes'” to both federal agencies and commercial licensees “on the right terms,” he said. The dynamic protection areas “will change the way we look at each relocation and whether or not we have to relocate at all for some systems,” he said: The average American is starting to realize the importance of spectrum “and that has been a welcome change.”

Many Questions

Lots of questions remain about how the national strategy will evolve, said Rick Reaser, CSMAC member from Raytheon.

“I don’t believe NTIA is positioned to actually write a strategy” and CSMAC could help, Reaser said. The committee could provide “a very good start” at coming up with some of the tenets of what a strategy should be “and what it should and should not address,” he said. CSMAC is “very smart and very good at those things and we are also able to look at both sides of issues a lot better than the NTIA and the FCC by themselves,” he said. “The government is getting smaller and smaller.” The reservation system, used since the 1920s for spectrum management, is no longer the rule, Reaser said: “That’s a huge policy shift.”

“What comes out of it from our perspective is more spectrum for terrestrial broadband, but in a new way that protects other interests that need protection,” said Tom Power, CTIA general counsel and a former White House and NTIA official. “What it really takes is alignment among these sort of concentric circles. The innermost circle is among the agencies, and that expands out, the White House and [Office of Management and Budget] have to be involved, the FCC and then the private sector gets pulled in.”

While he was Capitol Hill aide, Redl was “instrumental” in pushing different parties to work together, Power said. “It’s not necessarily that anyone has the right answers, you just get them in the room and sit at the table until you solve the problem,” Power said. CSMAC will have a role to play, he said. “A lot of people will tell you that CSMAC is a very challenging process to go through, and it is because these are hard problems,” he said. “You need those conversations to happen to advance the discussion.”

“Both NTIA and the White House have now clearly signaled their support for continuing a policy of sharing, rather than clearing, federal bands,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America and a CSMAC member. “The administration is reiterating the reality that its predecessor recognized, which is that the military and other federal users can share but not relinquish most of the spectrum they currently occupy.”

Sharing Important

Sharing has to remain a key part of administration policy, said Mark Crosby, president of the Enterprise Wireless Alliance, also a CSMAC member. “It certainly appears that the spectrum policy template in effect today relies heavily on smart devices coupled with the emerging capabilities of spectrum administrators to promote spectrum collaboration. That approach will provide opportunities for all types of users and uses, provided it works as well in the real world as it does in the lab. We trust, but we also want to verify. There still is a need for exclusive, protected spectrum options.”

“There’s sharing and there’s sharing,” said Fred Campbell of Tech Knowledge. The problem under the Obama administration was that its policy grew out of a 2012 report (see 1207230040) by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, Campbell said. DOD "has been working on the idea for years and industry has long believed that sharing has real promise,” he said. “Developing a national strategy for commercial and government spectrum sharing wasn’t the problem with the PCAST report. The problem with PCAST was its recommendations for how sharing rights would be allocated and assigned to commercial entities.”

Absent major reforms to the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee, which oversees federal use of spectrum, the best hope is “targeted sharing mechanisms for specific, high-opportunity bands, an incremental approach rather than radical change,” said Doug Brake, director-telecom policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “This isn’t to say there hasn’t been real progress, and work to be done to build on the Obama administration strategies,” he said. “Talk of bidirectional sharing is much more refined, for example, and the idea of agency leases holds a lot of promise.”

“You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what you’re aiming at,” said Steve Berry, president of the Competitive Carriers Association. “The administration’s focus on rural areas is particularly important to ensure consumers" in rural, unserved and underserved areas aren't "left behind," he said. "We were pleased to hear from administration officials yesterday that all options are on the table to free up more spectrum.”