WASHINGTON-The federal government is trying to mend its rocky relationship with the public-safety community, following a series of flare-ups between the two during the past year.
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration named Washington, D.C, lawyer Philip Verveer to chair the new Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee.
The panel will make recommendations on the operational, technical and spectrum requirements of federal, state and local public-safety agencies through 2010.
Verveer’s “leadership and energy at this critical time will do much to ensure that public-safety agencies have the most effective and efficient communications capability,” said Reed Hundt, FCC chairman.
In another gesture to reach out to the public-safety community, Hundt recently addressed the annual conference of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International Inc. But it may take more than that to assuage the public-safety community.
APCO in February accused the FCC of not complying with a 1993 congressional mandate to study present and future public-safety communications needs of federal, state and local government agencies through the year 2010 and to draw up a plan to meet those requirements.
In fact, the FCC’s five-year auction authority that began in 1993 is conditioned on meeting those objectives.
The 44-page report “is little more than a plan to conduct another study,” APCO Executive Director Ronnie Rand said at that time. The FCC, he went on to say, “continues to be more concerned with selling radio spectrum and serving the desires of commercial users than with meeting their basic obligation to provide radio frequencies to protect the safety of life.”
The FCC has raised $9 billion from spectrum auctions over the past 12 months. Public-safety users fear the emphasis on selling licenses for commercial, subscriber-based wireless services like advanced messaging and personal communications services may result in less spectrum for them.
The tensions between the FCC and the public-safety community appear to have eased somewhat in recent months. The FCC has proposed to exempt public-safety spectrum from auctions in another proceeding. But there’s still bad blood between the two parties.
APCO has appealed an FCC ruling that gradually forces public-safety microwave users off the 2 GHz band that PCS soon will occupy. PCS operators are responsible for funding the move of public-safety users to comparable facilities on higher frequencies. Opening briefs are due in early October and oral argument is set for Feb. 2.
Originally, the FCC said public-safety users didn’t have to leave the 2 GHz band.
Verveer, a political insider with ties to the Clinton administration, was the lead attorney in the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation of AT&T that led to the 1984 breakup. Considered one of the most talented communications attorneys around, Verveer represents, among others, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
The committee he heads will study the expanding needs of public safety, including the ability of police, fire and emergency medical personnel to communicate amongst themselves and with federal officials on common frequencies.
In addition, it will examine how advanced technologies can aid public-safety agencies and alternatives for them to obtain modern, state-of-the-art communications and equipment. APCO has dismissed suggestions that public-safety agencies lease communication capacity from common carrier wireless service providers.
