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WASHINGTON-In global spectrum allocations, life goes on even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
The United States has been working for almost a year to prepare for the World Radiocommunication Conference 2003, currently scheduled for Caracas, Venezuela, in June of that year, even though domestic allocation for third-generation wireless services arising out of the WRC-2000 remain up in the air.
In other words, even though the United States hasn’t figured out what spectrum to allocate for 3G, the rest of the world is on to something else.
As part of its preparation, the Federal Communications Commission’s WRC-2003 Industry Advisory Committee met late last month. In a surprisingly fast meeting-less than 40 minutes of the allotted two hours-the committee passed on to the FCC recommendations for a variety of issues, including whether to create a globally harmonized band of spectrum for wireless local area network equipment. The industry working group with responsibility for this issue preds at WRC-03 for global/regional harmonization for public protection and disaster relief services. However, if all studies have been completed and the determination is made that spectrum harmonization is desirable, practical and/or even necessary, then the primary focus should then be placed on bands currently designated or allocated for use by public protection and disaster relief services,” reads the document approved by the United States.
The WRC-2003 process is moving along very nicely, many participants say, noting that before the June meeting of the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission-known as CITEL for its Spanish name-the U.S. had developed preliminary views on 34 of the 39 announced agenda items for WRC-2003.
“It is pretty impressive. We are probably a year ahead of schedule,” said Brian F. Fontes, vice president for federal relations at Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and chair of the industry advisory committee.
The next major event to happen in the process is selecting an am
