WASHINGTON-Two members of the Senate Commerce Committee last week introduced legislation that would insulate the private wireless community from auctions.
The legislation sponsored by Sens. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) and John Breaux (D-La.) will define private wireless, insulate it from auction and require the Federal Communications Commission to identify 12 megahertz of spectrum for private wireless use. The bill also allows lease fees to be assessed to use that spectrum.
The Industrial Telecommunications Association has been working for months on getting the legislation introduced, amid some resistance from other private wireless associations.
ITA President Mark Crosby had hoped and predicted that last week’s 1999 Private Wireless Spectrum Management Conference and Exposition would serve as a backdrop to introduce the Private Wireless Spectrum Use Act. He got that wish.
“We are very, very pleased with the introduction of this bill. We think this is a great bill for private wireless. We are finally getting a definition of who and what we are and hopefully getting some spectrum,” Crosby said following the announcement that the bill had been introduced.
The concept and prospect of the bill interested FCC top wireless staff, who participated on various panels at the ITA conference before the bill’s introduction last Thursday.
“Spectrum is a finite resource. In making our decisions that some people are going to receive spectrum and others aren’t … the role of managing spectrum is a very complex one … having lease fees as a tool will enable us to respond to complaints from other sectors of the industry who say they can use it more efficiently,” said Ari Fitzgerald, legal adviser to FCC Chairman William Kennard.
The legislation seemed to interest Thomas Sugrue, chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, who said he could sell the concept of lease fees “inside the [FCC] to people who are skeptical of private wireless needs.”
The private wireless community and the FCC should not wait for passage, said Jeanne Bumpus, Gorton’s legislative counsel, who noted the difficulty in getting bills enacted into law.
“The odds are against it [passing] so I don’t know what [impact] this will have on the FCC because the vast majority of [bills] are not enacted into law … Right now the power will reside with the FCC so by no means don’t wait for this bill to pass,” Bumpus said.
Another issue Sugrue said he could sell inside the FCC is the band-manager concept, where for-profit entities would bid for spectrum at auction and then contract with the private wireless industry to use that spectrum.
ITA is pressing the use of band managers in an attempt to gain access to spectrum being made available from the transition to digital TV.
“I thought [the band-manager concept] was creative. The only way this spectrum is available to this community [is through auction] and [the] band-manager [concept] may be one approach … The bureau is giving it serious consideration,” Sugrue said.
Likewise, Fitzgerald said he found the band-manager concept intriguing.
ITA presented a concept outline to the FCC last month. The outline and an interview with Crosby suggest there would be rules requiring that only band managers could participate in the auction and the spectrum only could be employed for private wireless use.
However, restricting the auction to band managers and the spectrum block to only private wireless use may cause problems, said Peter Tenhula, senior legal adviser to FCC Commissioner Michael Powell.
The government is transitioning channels 60-69 (746-806 MHz) from TV use to other areas. Twenty-four megahertz was allocated for public-safety uses and 36 megahertz is expected to be auctioned for commercial purposes.
ITA said allocating six megahertz for private wireless use is compatible with the commercial use provisions of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 because “neither the statute itself nor the relative conference report language specifically defines the nature of the `commercial’ services to be eligible for this allocation.”
Originally, the spectrum was not to be auctioned until 2001, but Congress, in its attempt to offset other priorities this year, included language in the defense appropriations bill that would require the auction to be held before Oct. 1. President Clinton recently signed the bill.
The mood of ITA’s conference was more upbeat than last year, when private wireless thought FCC legal advisers did not understand their industry and that the only available option to gain access to more spectrum was through the auction process.
The message this year was different.
“We’ve developed quite an interested and a sophisticated understanding of this community and that will be reflected in the decisions that will be made in the next few years,” Fitzgerald said.
Sugrue, who joined the FCC as WTB chief in January, urged the private wireless community to “walk a mile in our shoes, understand our pressures … think creatively … positively … proactively not reactively.”
