Dear Editor:
In a March 29 letter in RCR from Daniel F. Akerson, chairman and CEO, Nextel Communications Inc., Mr. Akerson states “what we are asking the Justice Department to do is provide a level playing field in the wireless industry in which we can fairly compete.”
I realize Mr. Akerson wasn’t involved with Nextel (then FleetCall) back in the early ’90s when it petitioned the FCC for its now infamous “waiver” to create an enhanced SMR service in six major markets. However, I’m sure in some forgotten back storeroom it must still have boxes of paperwork concerning that petition and all the subsequent flap it created. Plus, the FCC’s archives will still have all of the filings. But just in case Mr. Akerson hasn’t had time to read them, perhaps a brief synopsis would be in order:
After FleetCall filed the petition, many of the reply comments, from both friend and foe alike, agreed that what the company was asking for was to become a de facto third cellular carrier, circumventing the FCC’s rules concerning only two such carriers per market. FleetCall’s responses to those replies (and I’m paraphrasing), basically were that it was not trying to become a cellular carrier. Its argument was that SMR rules already allowed interconnect, so that was nothing new, and what it was proposing was a new SMR technology that would create more channels (from existing 800 MHz SMR channels) and “increase spectral efficiency.” The company’s reasons for this were that in the six specific markets listed in the petition, there simply were no channels left to accommodate growth, and unless FleetCall came to the rescue, why, all those poor existing and future SMR users simply would have no place to go.
I’m not even going to comment about how for some mysterious reason dispatch users in those markets continued to have plenty of places to go for the next six or seven years after that. And, I’m not going to comment about how it was then Nextel who went to them and told them that they had to trade their perfectly good dispatch radios for digital handsets because “they had no place else to go” (I guess you could call FleetCall’s premise in their petition a self-fulfilling prophecy). I’m not going to comment about how those six specific markets somehow turned into the entire United States that suddenly needed to be “rescued” from all that spectral inefficiency that was going on, nor am I going to comment about the dozens of other similar misrepresentations that FleetCall/Nextel has made through the years.
My point here is twofold: Nextel needs more channels because its dispatch system is not spectrally efficient as it originally represented, but rather spectrally inefficient. Its one-to-one dispatch means that a 20-unit company can potentially tie up 20 channels in 20 different cell sites simultaneously. In contrast, a true fleet dispatch system need only use one channel at a time to talk to one, five or 20 units.
Secondly, and most important, Nextel’s main argument in the petition and replies was that it was an SMR, using SMR-designated frequencies (and by this the company clearly meant the “upper 200 channels” of the 800 MHz two-way band, which were categorized as SMR). The petition said that the company would take those SMR frequencies and increase capacity by 15 to 30 fold, or more. But today we see that Nextel has acquired 800 MHz channels all over the band. And, what it couldn’t acquire through open purchase it is now in the position of acquiring as a result of the Nextel … , er, I mean the “800 MHz” auction, thus giving the company approximately 90 percent of all 800 MHz spectrum in the country. And now we see Nextel making a move for a big portion of the 900 MHz band, which is a far cry from the original waiver request.
Over the years when various regulators have tried to impose common carrier regulations on Nextel, the company has cried “You can’t do that … we’re not a carrier, we’re an enhanced SMR!,” Then, when regulators say, “OK, you’re an enhanced SMR, so build your systems out of the 800 MHz SMR frequencies that you’ve got, and that are for SMR service,” it cries, “We just want to be treated like other carriers.”
So, Mr. Akerson, it seems to me that what Nextel wants is not so much a game that has a “level playing field,” but rather a game with a rule book that Nextel controls, and can change whenever it wants to.
Lonnie R. Danchik
Chairman
Small Business in Telecommunications
