Knapp Says FCC Must Continue to Protect Spectrum Incumbents
LAS VEGAS -- The FCC will continue to make protection of spectrum incumbents a top priority, as pressure grows to squeeze more onto the radio waves as the commission implements the National Broadband Plan, Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julie Knapp said at the CTIA convention. The challenges are in many ways the same the FCC has long faced, though they're growing more complex, he said. “We take as a given that there’s a need to protect the incumbent services against harmful interference,” Knapp said. “At the same time we have an objective of both assuring that we provide the opportunity for new services to be introduced and to make sure that the spectrum is being used efficiently."
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Knapp told us that while the challenges are growing, they're not new for the commission. “These are the same sorts of issues the commission has tackled through the years and I have every confidence that we can tackle them here as well,” he said. Coordination among carriers is critical, Knapp said. “Among the carriers the downside of flexibility from the technical folks is that command and control gives some comfort to the engineers because they know exactly what’s going to be there,” he said. “When it’s flexible you don’t know for sure."
Dale Hatfield, former OET chief, said, “It’s very hard for people to sit in Washington and decide how much spillover there should be between different” licensees. “The other thing that bothers me from a big, big, big public policy standpoint is what we're saying is there are efficiencies that arise from having diversity of competitors, that we have to build in guard bands because they won’t coordinate with each other,” said Hatfield, now executive director of the Silicon Flatirons. “If that’s the truth, then that drives you probably in the marketplace to more consolidation, because if I can consolidate the market I can then recover the inefficiencies in those guard bands and so forth."
Steve Sharkey, senior director at Motorola, said that shows how complex interference issues are and the number of “moving parts” there are to defining interference. “Interference really is in the eyes of the beholder,” he said. “It gets more complex now once we're talking about data systems. Interference may not completely make things break down, but will it significantly affect the data rates than you can get through to a user?” Managing interference will become more difficult as demands grow, Sharkey predicted. “The commission has time after time recognized the value of putting like systems next to each other and that gets more and more difficult as the spectrum gets more and more congested and there are more and more demands on it."
Sharkey said in an interview the FCC must continue to exercise care as it addresses the mandates in the broadband plan. “They've talked about moving ahead on AWS 2 and 3,” he said. “There are interference issues there that have been debated for a long time. I wouldn’t want to see them rush to judgment just so they can say they've freed up spectrum, but really caused interference problems to existing services."
"From my company’s perspective we think it’s fantastic that the FCC announced a goal of freeing up 500 MHz of spectrum over the next 10 years and 300 MHz within five years,” said Praveen Goyal, senior manager at Research in Motion. “That’s a great aspirational goal but I think there’s still a lot of questions that remain about how we get there.” Among questions that remain are “what do we in the meantime before that spectrum all gets to the market, how do we use what we have more efficiently,” Goyal said. “We're not convinced based on the adoption rates that we're seeing that [the 500 MHz] will come along soon enough."
"Qualcomm’s opinion is that this is a fabulous plan,” said Dean Brenner, vice president of government affairs. Lots of things have to “happen simultaneously” to get more spectrum online while also making spectrum use more efficient, he said. “The plan lays out a good framework for that to happen,” he said. Getting 500 MHz more spectrum in the market will be difficult, he conceded. “Nothing is easy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” he said.
Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter warned against net neutrality regulations for wireless, which are now before the FCC. “Net Neutrality regulation could impede the growing wireless industry,” he said. “Don’t assume harm from the wireless industry where it hasn’t presented itself.” Spalter said the “next really cool thing” in wireless should be a “flexible and reasonable regulatory environment to promote continued innovation in the wireless space.”
CTIA Notebook
Panelists at a CTIA presentation on mobile policy said the best way to resolve the net neutrality controversy is to let consumers decide which policy should apply to them. Volubill CEO John Aalbers said by letting consumers choose self-designed packages based on their own priorities, “operators create the impression consumers have control, when the control is really within the package they sign up for. It’s a great marketing tool.” Don Bowman, co-founder of Sandvine, said the idea puts the operators in a position of being the good guys instead of the enemy and would build loyalty and reduce churn.
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The NGN/IMS Forum began a Technical Working Group for applications running on fixed and mobile broadband networks, at the CTIA show Wednesday. The TWG will help accelerate the availability of IMS-based applications by providing additional tools and resources for application developers, content creators, network operators and vendors, the forum said. The IMS investment enables network operators to exploit applications running inside their network or by third-party application developers and content providers, said Michael Cooper, an Alcatel-Lucent vice president. TWG will concentrate on helping application developers create better internetwork Web 2.0 applications with IMS networks and business support systems/operations support systems, said forum President Michael Khalilian.