Ralph Haller, former Wireless Telecommunications Bureau deputy chief and chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Private Radio Bureau, has been a private citizen for almost a month now, following his retirement June 10 after 25 years of public service. Since his retirement, he has formed his own consulting company-Fox Ridge Communications-and has been on the road, drumming up business for the company.
Recently, Haller took some time to reflect on his years with the commission, the decisions he and that agency made that impacted the wireless community, where the FCC is headed and the direction Fox Ridge will take.
Haller candidly discussed the good and the not-so-good with Debra Wayne, RCR’s Washington reporter.
RCR: You didn’t have to retire right now. Why did you?
RALPH HALLER: I never meant to have a government career. I joined the government because the person in charge of the Kansas City office asked me one day if I’d be interested, and my reaction was “Work for the government? You’ve got to be kidding!” But they did hire me; I went to Los Angeles and spent about six years there. I came back here. I kept getting promoted. Every time I thought about leaving, I’d get promoted into a better, more exciting job.
I got to a point where I had to think about staying until I could work a good retirement plan. There was a point of no return where I had to stay no matter what. And because of the government cutbacks and the offers to take early outs, which is 25 years at any age, I finally had my opportunity to get out of the government and into the private sector. It certainly wasn’t a snap decision. It was not a decision that had anything to do with changes in the commission. It was a plan I’ve had for the last 10 years to hopefully get back out into the private side.
RCR: How disappointed were you when you weren’t made bureau chief at the time of the creation of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau?
HALLER: I, of course, at that point was hopeful that I would wind up with the new bureau. Having the success with PCS and auctions, I thought I had a fair, fighting chance of getting it. In retrospect, there are some elements of it that were probably just fine. I frankly was ready to leave the commission at that time. I felt like the end of the PCS work would be an opportune time to go. I think the bright side was that it gave me the opportunity to make a transition to think about what I wanted to do next and to take some of the responsibilities off of me to do so. I was able to concentrate on areas I particularly enjoy, such as public safety.
I also would like to put in a plug for Michele Farquhar. I’ve known Michele for a long time. We’ve worked together for about 10 years in one way or another. Michele is extraordinarily bright, a quick study and very interested in the things that are happening. She wants to understand the decisions she makes on the industry, and I think that the industry is very lucky to have Michele as chief. I have every confidence that she will do everything in her power to make the right public-interest decisions, even if they are not totally in alignment with what’s best for the government. If the public-interest decision falls somewhere else, she will stand up and make that decision. I encourage the industry to spend a lot of time with Michele to make sure that she, in fact, does know what they want, what they need, so that they can affect her decision. I feel confident that the bureau is in good hands.
RCR: In any of your FCC incarnations, what do you consider to be your shining hour? What was your worst?
HALLER: I would have to say the finest hour, in terms of accomplishing what many viewed as an impossible job, was bringing the personal communications services auction rules together in the timeframe of the PCS Taskforce. We were bringing many divergent groups together, getting consensus, getting the rules out, adopting the first auctions and all of it was successful and with basically no problems. I think that was the most difficult and most successful activity of my career.
I also feel very good about providing opportunities for explosive growth in SMR and paging, putting a licensing process in place that will put licenses out in 30 days instead of 30 months.
If I had it to do all over again, I probably wouldn’t have done refarming. I think there will be some good things that will come out of refarming in terms of improved spectrum efficiency, but I also believe that this is one of those areas where efficiency is not well-understood. I think that, in one sense, the existing land mobile environment at 150 MHz and 450 MHz were already the most efficient use of spectrum of any of the commission licenses.
When you look at the number of licensees sharing that spectrum, even though they are on 25-kilohertz channels, the amount of communications going on is tremendous. In retrospect, I’m not sure we needed refarming.
RCR: Was refarming an industry objective or an FCC objective?
HALLER: It was both. There were people in the industry saying they were running out of spectrum, and what should they do? And refarming was to address that. I think that the basic technical work we did for refarming was good, and the industry came up with a compromise position, which the commission adopted. I think the follow-up measures regarding trying to use exclusive-use overlays and to allow entrepreneurial operations in the 150 MHz and 450 MHz bands are-and I know this is an open rulemaking yet-to a great extent not what refarming should have been about. Refarming should have been about technical parameters, and it turned into economic and social overtones.
RCR: Was there something that you wanted to accomplish during your tenure at the FCC that just didn’t happen?
HALLER: Yes. I would have taken a different route in the way we regulate all carriers. Back in 1993, when Congress passed legislation regarding commercial mobile radio systems, I was very much an advocate of not bringing SMRs under the umbrella of common carriers. I wanted to take the common-carrier obligations off of cellular, off of paging; PCS never had it. I was very much a believer in the market being a much better regulator than the government could ever be.
As it turned out, that didn’t match the desires of Congress, so we now have lots more people under the umbrella of common carriage, and I’m not sure if there’s a clear-cut benefit to that to anyone. I feel like it’s like grocery stores or any other business-if you put enough competition out in the market, the government doesn’t have to stand over it and specify what the obligations are.
RCR: Does the commission as a whole or at the bureau level truly take into account what is said by the wireless industry in the comment cycles and in ex parte presentations?
HALLER: I don’t think the record is ever ignored. In fact, the record is always reviewed in some detail. I do think, however, in terms of the final process, that making rules is like making sausage-you don’t want to know what is involved during processing. Lots of people with their own views enter into the final decision. There are the comments that enter into the final decision. One of the things about the comments that you have to keep in mind is, generally speaking, comments are never totally unbiased. You have to assess whether this is an accurate picture of the environment.
RCR: Have there ever been instances where the commission just didn’t get it or when the industry just didn’t get it?
HALLER: I guess the answer to that is probably yes, although it’s probably not that black and white. I think that one of the fine examples we have of that right now is that I don’t think there is an adequate understanding at the commission about the value of the private radio services-the value to the industry, the value to the American people-and that is one of the reasons that I’m very enthusiastic about the white paper (Wireless Telecom Bureau technology advisor) David Wye is doing. I do
n’t know if he is going to make the July deadline, although that was the original plan, but I think it will be critically important.
I think at this point that there is a bias at the commission that if it is not a common carrier service, it could be “wasteful” spectrum, and people should be going to third parties. I simply don’t agree with that because third parties by definition have to provide broad services to a broad section of society. There are unique things about the private side-the remote operation of cranes for building buildings or ships, the remote monitoring of reservoirs, things like this that common carriers not only are not equipped to do, they don’t want to do it. So I think there still is a tremendous need for these private systems. Dispatch services are critically important to many people-police, fire, forestry-who need direct, person-to-person communications. I think this is the one instance right now where the commission doesn’t get it.
I also think the industry doesn’t “get” how to describe its needs to the commission. I think that’s an area where there is a brick wall. This is an area where there are two distinctly different sides, and neither one really understands the other at this point.
RCR: Is the industry involving itself in determining its future or is it sitting back, waiting to react rather than to act?
HALLER: I guess I’ve always had the feeling that the industry is more reactive than proactive. The proactive people are the ones with the new ideas and that tends to be a smaller subset of what is really out there. Everyone else is reactive, in the sense of protecting what they have right now. Much of the regulatory process is used to protect turf. People file petitions to deny and they recon rulemakings, often as a tack to hold off competition.
RCR: Prior to starting your new venture, Fox Ridge Communications, were you courted by any of the big carriers or manufacturers?
HALLER: The one thing that I felt very strongly about was that I had been in a very large bureaucracy for the past 25 years and, whatever I went into next, I wanted it to be small. I actually had the opportunity to go into partnership with people doing similar things to what I’m doing now. It really came down to the fact that I want to do this on my own, so I wasn’t looking for job offers. Now I’m looking for clients.
I want Fox Ridge to be a company that serves the needs of the clients, to be a flexible company. I think there are lots of things that with 25 years at the commission I can use to help clients get what they need from the commission or any other government agency. I also want to do some international work as well. I have another area I think is one that is going to be looking for assistance-public safety. In the next 10 years, every public-safety operation in this country is going to at least begin to modernize and to move into a very high-tech interoperable environment. In that sense, I hope to be very active with them. I view that not only as a business opportunity for Fox Ridge but as making peoples’ lives safer, whether it be the general public, the firefighter, etc.
I also potentially see that as the commission’s licensing becomes more complex, I will be able to help people with that.
RCR: During the course of a recent speech by Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Michele Farquhar, she alluded that most of the carriers handling wireless 10 years from now are unknown today. You’ve seen new entrants come and go, and you’ve seen incumbents diversify. Who might those new carriers be?
HALLER: I’m not sure who they’ll be, but there are lots of markets out there that have been barely tapped at this point. Wireless local area networks, wireless PBX systems, those kinds of things will generate new entrants who will become carriers and suppliers. I think that this is enhanced by the fact that it has become so costly to change wiring every time you change offices or buildings that people have got to look at a wireless solution. On top of that, services are changing so fast that, if you have a brand new building and you wire it today for integrated services digital network capability and other exotic networks, all that wiring soon will be obsolete. It’s much easier to change out some base stations and upgrade a system than to rewire a building. I perceive those as being up-and-coming businesses of the future.
I also see the wireless last mile, whether it’s the last mile of cable or the last mile of public switched services. I think there will be lots of opportunities there.
RCR: Almost all of the career wireless employees at the commission are gone. Everyone is new, and there is an intense learning curve. Is this a bad thing that people with institutional memory will not be there to help?
HALLER: I think there are two sides to that question, including how do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? I think you can look at the 220 MHz issue and use that as an example of maybe not making the correct decision. It was a very hard-fought battle at the commission to reallocate that spectrum from the amateurs specifically to provide a home for narrowband. At some point along the way, that whole concept was lost. As a result-although I don’t think I can define who the winners and losers are-I think that for all that went into making that band available for narrowband, perhaps not enough attention was paid.
Now let’s look at the other side of that. It may well be that when you have this entrenched knowledge, it’s hard for people to see things a different way. As you start to move new people in, they look at the issues in a different way, and in some cases you may have better public policy because of that. It’s good to have a mix of new people and people with history to battle out where the middle of the road policy should be. I do think there’s a danger that as more of us with corporate knowledge leave, mistakes that we made will be repeated. Out of the blue, the direction changes. While almost every change is a lost opportunity for someone, it can be an opportunity for someone else. It is terribly important for a government agency not to look schizophrenic. While it may have the power and authority to change direction abruptly-and it may be appropriate to make those kinds of changes once in a while-in general, those abrupt changes have a devastating effect on the industry and should be used as a tool only in the most extreme cases.
RCR: Are they being made sparingly now?
HALLER: I think the commission is at least partially in schizophrenic mode. In particular, I worry about freezes. There’s a freeze at 220 MHz. There’s a paging freeze. I understand that when you are in transition, it’s convenient not to have the environment change. But that also has a potentially devastating effect on people who need to expand their businesses, who need new channels and can’t get them because there’s been a 24-month freeze on them. One of the mistakes I made was to freeze paging channels a couple of times, and I regret doing that. I today would be very wary of putting a freeze in place. It stifles business growth, and it’s one of those things the industry doesn’t anticipate. Business plans and venture capital all of a sudden go on hold.
RCR: If you had it to do all over again, would you have entered government service?
HALLER: I certainly don’t regret any part of my service with the FCC. But I think that these have been very exciting times in the development of the communications industry, and I felt like I wanted to be part of it. As an example, when the SMR and private carrier paging industries started taking off, I really wanted to be out there as part of the industry in the private sector to take advantage of it. The part that I played was to facilitate those industries being able to grow and flourish in an unregulated environment but I really would have liked to have been a player on the other side.
I do think, however, in terms of the final process, that making rules is like making sausage-y
ou don’t want to know what is involved during processing.
