WASHINGTON-Federal Communications Commission officials said microwave relocation guidelines will be clarified but not fundamentally altered later this month, despite intense lobbying by the wireless telecommunications industry for major rule changes to keep pocket telephone companies from having to pay excessive sums of money to move fixed radio systems of utilities, public safety agencies and local governments from the 2 GHz band to higher frequencies.
With a vote on microwave cost-sharing set for April 25, the wireless industry is turning up the heat at the FCC and on Capitol Hill in hopes of persuading federal regulators to also take bolder steps to reform microwave relocation procedures.
Rosalind Allen, associate chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, said the agency will clarify that personal communications services licensees are responsible only for relocating microwave links that interfere with new pocket telephone service rather than entire systems of fixed users.
However, Allen noted that PCS operators may choose to move microwave systems from the 2 GHz band to a higher frequency as a premium.
FCC rules establish a two-year voluntary negotiating period and a one-year mandatory negotiating period for PCS and most microwave users to work out relocation arrangements. Public safety entities are subject to a three-year voluntary/two-year mandatory negotiation timeline.
FCC staff members said changes to those parameters would raise legal questions.
PCS licensees must pay to relocate microwave systems licensed on airwaves that new, digital pocket telephone systems have spent billions of dollars to gain access to.
PCS and microwave licensees have been engaged in bitter fighting for the past year over relocation. Pocket telephone carriers allege they are being gouged by some microwave licensees, who refuse to deal in good faith.
Microwave users counter that PCS licensees simply want to low-ball offers to move fixed users to comparable facilities. Early estimates put the cost of moving each microwave link at $250,000, but figures now flying around go way beyond that mark.
Wireless carriers used last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on spectrum reform as a platform to lodge complaints against microwave users and to press policymakers for relief.
“We are concerned … that one spectrum-management precedent that was set by the FCC’s PCS-related rules will inhibit the launch of PCS and your efforts to free up more spectrum for the private sector in the future,” said Sprint Spectrum L.P. Chief Executive Officer Ronald LeMay in written testimony.
LeMay recommended the two-stage microwave relocation process be collapsed into one “good faith” negotiating period during which microwave users would be fully reimbursed for relocating to higher frequencies.
In his testimony, Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association President Thomas Wheeler produced a document by the Suffolk County, N.Y., Police Department that in addition to a complete digital microwave upgrade asked that “an additional revenue of $18 millio … be included as an inducement to consummate this negotiation in a timely manner.”
