WASHINGTON-No one has taken advantage of the much-hailed secondary-market rules in their first month of effectiveness, said wireless bureau officials on Wednesday.
“Thirty days and no applications yet,” said Katherine Harris of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Harris was attending a luncheon seminar given by her colleague David Furth, associate bureau chief and counsel of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
“Which in a sense doesn’t surprise us,” continued Furth. “I think there is a fair amount of interest but we were never anticipating when these rules went into effect there would be a flood tide of requests. I think what is happening is that the market, the industry and the communications lawyers are looking at the rules, looking at the process and trying to figure out how it fits in; how it adds to the existing secondary-markets regime. I think there are other factors including the condition of the telecom market that may also have an impact on what we might see over the course of the next few months. We certainly anticipate that there will be these transactions, but the question still is what the volume or the nature of those will be. We really do see this as an evolutionary process.”
The FCC has touted its secondary-markets rules as a way to better let the market decide the best use of spectrum. Furth said that the rules were a first step in a process to streamline regulatory review of spectrum usage that has gone on for 40 years.
“We also had an incremental approach to leasing,” said Furth in his opening comments at the seminar on spectrum-use rules in Europe and the United States. “Ultimately it took a very long time.”
The FCC is not done with its secondary-market rules. After adopting these rules, it asked further questions about how to make the process even better and whether certain entities like public safety could lease spectrum for short periods of time with contracts that would give them immediate access to spectrum if needed.
If the current trend of not using the secondary-market rules continues, said Furth, the agency will be forced to look at what else it can do.
“One of the things we are interested in is how is adding this tool to the toolbox? What potential do the users have at getting access to spectrum?” asked Furth. “From our point of view they represent an integrated whole. What we really need to look at the entire package of options that are available to spectrum users and spectrum rights holders that allows them to give up some or all of those rights. It would be a mistake to look at these rules in isolation.”
