Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski was on the road this week, giving the stump speech for the FCC's "looming spectrum crisis" tour. The bottom line is that smartphone demand is skyrocketing and that wireless broadband providers need more licenses down the line. Therefore, both carriers and regulators regularly eyeball the appetizing 300 MHz of spectrum mostly reserved for over-the-air television broadcasters.
"Other countries -- our global competitors -- are focused on mobile opportunities in a way that simply hasn't been true in the past," Genachowski noted at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
[partner id="arstechnica"]"If we wait until there's a crisis to reallocate spectrum, we'll have waited too long -- for consumers, for our global competitiveness -- and I believe, for broadcasters," he warned.
"Turning back to prior experience, what history shows us is that when broadcasters, the FCC, and Congress worked together in a straightforward and fair way that was focused on solving problems, we reached solutions that delivered tremendous benefits to our country."
That "working together" bit hasn't really come together so far. The idea is to get these licensees to agree to "voluntary auctions" of about 120 MHz of their spectrum, in which they'll share in some of the auction revenue. There's also the possibility of government-coordinated spectrum sharing, in which wireless ISPs would buy rights to extant DTV licenses -- agreeing to a regimen of non-interference with broadcasters.
In the past, TV-band license holders have been either cool or outright hostile to these proposals. But a day before Genachowski spoke, a small gaggle of NBC and CBS TV affiliate representatives met with the FCC's top brass and suggested in very tentative language that they were ready to start thinking out loud about the problem.
Still, the word "voluntary" has yet to be worked out.
The TV reps pointed out that there are two groups of broadcasters to consider: those who want to keep their current 6-MHz channels and those willing to relinquish them. License owners in the first group are worried about "forced repacking," they warned, "including the prospect of diminished service areas, disruptive site changes, increased interference, inferior channel assignments (especially in the VHF spectrum band), and viewer disruptions; the threat of additional future spectrum reallocations that deter investment and innovation); and receiving prompt and full compensation for the many direct and indirect costs associated with repacking."
"Repacking" is a generic term for restructuring the TV-band environment, on the assumption that more efficient broadcasting methods will reduce the risk of interference if licenses are spaced closer together. This transition will open up many more frequencies for wireless broadband -- or at least that's the hope.
About a year ago, the Consumer Electronics Association and CTIA - The Wireless Association came up with a plan to do something like this.
The gist of the scheme was to move broadcast TV from a system based on single, high-power transmitters toward "distributed networks" -- closely spaced arrays of lower-power towers. The latter deployment would create "a much smaller interference footprint," CTIA/CEA contended, thus permitting "closer spacing between co-channel and adjacent channel television operations."
TV licensees pretty much panned the idea then, but note the mention of "prompt and full compensation" for repacking now, which suggests a reluctant acceptance of the concept.
Broadcasters in this group "also are concerned about the prospect of burdensome new spectrum fees," the representatives added, "which would impair broadcasters' ability to finance local programming and newsgathering and to provide innovative new services to the public."
As for those who want to sell, they "primarily are concerned that the process of relinquishing spectrum be voluntary in all respects, and not, e.g., coerced by threats of burdensome spectrum fees or other harms," the affiliate reps explained.
This was followed by the obligatory promotion of over-the-air broadcasting:
There should be "no assumptions or predetermined answers, and the FCC should consider all connected issues, alternatives, and trade-offs, including trade-offs implicating the public interest in a robust, competitive, and innovative broadcast service," the TV reps concluded.
You can interpret this presentation as another stonewalling of the Commission's proposals. But our tea-leaf reading sees it as the opening of a willingness among broadcasters to share or sell off some of their spectrum. The word "voluntary," by the way, appeared no less than 17 times in Chairman Genachowski's nine-page speech.
"Voluntary," Genachowski explained, "means not only that no broadcaster will be forced to offer up spectrum for auction. It means that those who do choose to participate will know exactly what the deal is before relinquishing any rights."
But "voluntary" doesn't mean "undermining the potential effectiveness of an auction by giving every broadcaster a new and unprecedented right to keep their exact channel location," he added. "This would not only be unprecedented, it would give any one broadcaster veto power over the success of the auction -- and be neither good policy for the country, nor fair to the other participants."
And therein lies the rub. In order for some broadcasters to "voluntarily" relinquish their spectrum, the repacking regime that will facilitate that option could affect all broadcasters, including those that want to stay in the DTV game. Thus the question of whether it will be "voluntary in all respects" will be open to many interpretations.
Photo: (fudj/Flickr)
