Who’s hot on wireless stocks? Some judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, apparently. The explanation for the latest delay in the FCC RF radiation standard lawsuit is conflict of interest, according to the court’s scheduling clerk. This little complication is not unusual, mind you.
But the ebb and flow of the RF standard appeal is getting kind of weird.
Starts and stops have been the order of the day since early August, when oral argument originally was set.
The case jumped on and off the expedited docket, with one pause caused by the FCC’s insistence that FCC counsel Joel Marcus, rather than the FCC lawyer heavily immersed in the litigation-C. Grey Pash-argue the case.
Mark your calendar for the week of Jan. 11 for oral argument; that is, of course, unless wireless bulls make it too hard for the robed ones to resist calling Charles Schwab.
EPA head Carol Browner, who negotiated RF safety policy with former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, will be happy to know that few others-including most agencies in U.S. government-care for the 1996 RF safety standard.
Seems that an IRAC (interdepartment radio advisory committee) subcommittee is poised to recommend that federal agencies have flexibility to adopt the FCC RF standard or the 1992 ANSI/IEEE standard. For many agencies, like DOD and FAA, this is a no-brainer: 1992 ANSI/IEEE, hands down.
The European Union, the World Health Organization and others, for their part, are going their own way.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which still has the 1976 ANSI RF standard on the books, has long held that RF safety guidelines for government and the private sector should be harmonized. But it knows better.
From the get-go, the Pentagon and others opposed the latest FCC RF standard for various reasons-some practical, others scientific.
What does all this mean for the RF standard court appeal? Who knows. The wireless industry, which has spent the last couple of years figuring out how to comply with the 1996 RF standard and the last six years spending $25 million on scientific enlightenment-turned-disillusionment, is watching the case closely.
If the soccer mom-environmentalist-organized labor triumvirate succeeds in court, it will not be as simple as falling back on the ’92 ANSI/IEEE standard-which the FCC originally proposed in 1993.
The issue-a politically explosive one-that industry does not want the court to come back with is whether (or why) the FCC RF standard does not cover possible non-thermal effects. If that happens, all bets are off. Ask the Canadians; they are mulling it right now.
