WASHINGTON-The Utilities Telecommunications Council, has taken issue with a recent technical blueprint regarding pool consolidation floated at the Federal Communications Commission by the Industrial Telecommunications Association, and the group has submitted a plan of its own that it said better protects utilities and public-safety entities.
“The proposal is premised on the misguided assumption that a two-pool plan can address the needs of users whose operations needs are extremely diverse,” UTC countered. “Miscalculations in the coordination of commercial interests would undoubtably cause some hardship on these licensees; miscalculations in the coordination of vital public interests, such as utilities and pipelines, would result in disaster.”
While agreeing with ITA about plans to protect railroad and airport frequencies in major metropolitan areas, UTC criticized the blueprint for not providing the same level of protection for critical utilities. “Unlike railroads or airports, virtually every location in the United States has electric, water and/or gas service; thus, the need for communications channels by these entities is extremely widespread … The authors of the blueprint correctly recommend that new emergency response channels be allocated for use by these entities. UTC supports the allocation of spectrum to meet emergency response and mutual-aid requirements; however, the eight paired channels proposed in the blueprint are woefully inadequate.”
According to UTC, there are more than 3,000 utilities using allotted frequencies, many on a shared basis; during such natural emergencies as hurricanes, sometimes 40 different utilities will be on the channels while they make repairs and restore service.
UTC recommended that three pools rather than two be adopted by the commission in the post-refarming era-emergency response, public service and business/commercial. The group denotes emergency response as being the most highly critical of the three, public service as being critical and business/commercial as being non-critical. Having decided this, UTC wants to reallocate refarmed channels based on channel loading, operation areas, criticality of use and airtime. In addition, “an attempt should be made to allocate contiguous channels to each service category in order to facilitate channel stacking,” it wrote.
The association also outlined its plan for interservice sharing (from the most critical to the least critical but not the other way around), capacity resale (business/commercial could lease to anyone; public service and emergency response users could lease only to each other) and frequency coordination (narrow certification standards for those that want to coordinate public-service and emergency-response categories).
“UTC’s plan also will promote the deployment of advanced technologies,” it added. “By ensuring that channels remain available and that new adjacent operations have similar functional concerns, emergency-response and public-service organizations can successfully deploy new, more advanced systems.”
If the commission does decide to adopt a two-pool plan, UTC forwarded its own version, which would consolidate 10 public-safety-related radio services and 10 business and commercial services. “This plan would retain some of the benefits of UTC’s three-pool plan by grouping together services based on their functions and would protect services for which the failure of their public land mobile radio system would create an imminent danger to public safety,” it wrote. UTC’s public-service pool also would gain benefit from new narrowband channels available via refarming, and “railroads and utilities could also seek limited protection for channels currently set aside for specific public-safety use.”
Other tenets of UTC’s two-pool plan include: interservice sharing only by public-safety poolers; only commercial/business poolers could resell excess capacity to anyone, while public-safety entities would be restricted to reselling only to other members of that pool; and limiting frequency coordination only to those who have been certified to coordinate eligibles in the two pools.
