Posted on 04/04/2002 1:26:24 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
The heads of the Federal Communication Commission and other telecommunications agencies Thursday began drawing a map for handling the nation's increasing demand on radio frequencies.
The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration convened the "Spectrum Summit" to discuss how private and government radio license holders could most equitably share the finite, crowded number of radio bands available, said Commerce Secretary Donald Evans.
"This administration clearly understands the role spectrum management will play in the future of our economic security ... now more than ever, we're aware of its impact on national security," Evans told the gathering. For schools, "transferring information can mean transferring education, and that can mean transforming lives."
The NTIA controls spectrum use among government agencies, and the FCC handles commercial users such as radio stations and wireless phone companies. FCC Chairman Michael Powell said Congress has required the two agencies to coordinate efforts on spectrum planning for the past decade.
"This mechanism has been allowed to lay fallow, and [NTIA head] Nancy [Victory] and I are committed to ... improving spectrum management policies," Powell said. "This summit, in many ways, is long overdue. Many of the challenges we're facing are crying out for high-level involvement."
The challenge was prominently displayed in the form of a wall-size chart detailing the uses of radio frequencies between 3 kilohertz and 300 gigahertz. Resembling an incoherent kaleidoscope image, the chart showed a hodgepodge of concurrent and sometimes competing users in many bands.
Public safety officials, cell phone users and wireless computing devices are among the vast majority of radio applications vying for the most technically valuable frequencies below 3 gigahertz, about 10 percent of available spectrum.
"The challenge we face is that now there are new wireless technologies on the horizon, and they want to use that same 10 percent," Evans said. "It is not an option to close the door on new technologies and the benefits they bring."
Victory said the two-day summit was meant to put government regulators into "listening mode," not to come to final decisions.
"The end result hopefully will be an understanding of which areas need the most attention," Victory said. "We might find that doing a better job of spectrum management requires changing our management practices, and we shouldn't be afraid to do that."
Whatever policy changes come from the summit's conclusions, Powell said, some principles should guide the discussion. Free-market mechanisms should be used to get the appropriate spectrum to the highest-value users, he said, and existing users should remain protected from interference while new technologies are brought online.
There is precedent for the government being able to meet the challenge, Evans said. He pointed to recent decisions on allowing the use of some ultrawideband devices, which use very low-power transmissions over a vast range of frequencies.
Users, especially those involved with the Global Positioning System, had worried the UWB method's reliance on a large chunk of allocated spectrum would cause dangerous interference.
The work of the FCC and NTIA met those concerns and enabled the emerging use of automotive radar systems and other UWB applications, Evans said.
"We shouldn't have to go through a drawn-out and contentious process every time a new technology comes along," Evans said. The government needs to review how it plans for future spectrum usage, he said, as well as how existing procedures might retard the growth of new services.
The spectrum issue is a global one, Evans said, and the United States needs to maintain its leadership in determining how frequencies are allocated.
"In some cases, we may want to try to harmonize spectrum usage with other countries," Evans said. "[Then] our citizens can use their wireless devices when they travel, as well as potentially enjoy lower prices resulting from greater economies of scale in equipment production."
How about an auction? The FCC could divide the spectrum into lots. Every five or ten years the FCC could put the lots up for bid. The highest bidder gets first choice, then the next highest picks from the rest, and so on until all the lots are sold. The managers of each lot decide how to allocate their section, the goal being a return on their investment. Ten years later, it all gets reallocated again.
The money from the auction would be used to fund research projects to develop new spectrum communication technologies.
Your example reinforces my suggestion. In an auction type system, they couldn't afford to hoard. Even the big companies couldn't. They do now because they are given the frequencies by the FCC. If they had to pay for it, they would try their utmost to get a return on their money (or they would soon be out of business). The spectrum would become a market with managers and sublet spaces. Also, on the next go round, the little guys could band together and buy a section of their own.
Like when they inserted the Family Radio Service frequencies in between the channels of the General Mobile Radio Service... the technology is at the point now where 12.5 KHz of bandwidth is plenty for narrowband FM, and the FCC wants to take this down further, to 6.25 KHz.
The FCC needs to encourage further development above 3 GHz. but no one wants to go there because it's too expensive to build equipment that goes way up there. That's also where the hams have most of their "primary" allocations; below 3 GHz. the hams have either "co-primary" or "secondary"; i.e. their "right" to be there is somewhat diminished, and that "right" is key if one service starts to interfere with another service in the same band.
What the hams don't want to see is a chunk of a popular band being taken away and given to a service which doesn't use it, so it has to be "re-farmed", like what happened with 220-222 MHz., where the spectrum was given to Fed-Ex (IIRC) and then Fed-Ex turned around and went to a trunked system in the 800 MHz. band.... the hams will never get that 2 mc back, and that's why they pushed for the ASPA.
Now there's a push to put radiolocation devices in the 430-440 MHz. area, which is part of the most popular UHF voice band. Companies which go to the FCC with a shopping list of ham bands they want to use don't really know what the hams are doing there, and to make it worse, they usually want the "weak-signal" part of the band, where it's nice and quiet... precisely why the hams use that part for weak signal work.
But hams are not "channelized" -- not assigned to specific frequencies -- they can wander around anywhere between their band limits (within the confines of their gentlemen's agreement band plans), where the commercial services DO have to stick to their frequency assignments. This makes it kinda difficult to "share" a ham band... that's why the feds are probably gonna have to totally kick us out if they want to re-use a ham band.
There is a huge demand for RF out there for all sorts of applications, which encompasses many spectra OUTSIDE of the commercial AM and FM bands. AM and FM are pretty much allocated; new licensees are only going to turn up if present licensees lose their transmission license (and that is just about impossible, unless an AM or FM station is doing nothing but stomping on other stations in their service area, broadcasting profanities and obscene remarks 24/7, calling for armed insurrection, et cetera).
As more of the country gets wired for cable, this option might be used more often. But the juggling of available channels for new HDTV licenses along with existing NTSC licensees remaining on their old channels will definitely impose a limit on it.
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