WASHINGTON-Just as the new chair of the House Commerce Committee said Congress may not need to step in to speed the digital TV transition because the movement is gaining steam on its own, a public-safety group is lobbying to re-direct some frequencies set aside for commercial wireless to public-safety.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chair of the House Commerce Committee, warned that Congress does not need to get involved in hurrying along the DTV transition. “This is just a report, and Congress need not act if doing so would still be premature in light of the status of the transition at that time,” said Barton in a written statement Thursday in testimony before the House telecommunications subcommittee.
As part of the DTV initiative, TV broadcasters must give back extra spectrum by Dec. 31, 2006, or when 85 percent of the homes in their viewing area are capable of receiving digital signals, whichever is later. TV broadcasters were given an extra channel (six megahertz) of spectrum to convert to digital technology. After the transition, that spectrum is to be divided between public-safety (24 megahertz) and commercial (36 megahertz) uses. A guard band of six megahertz has already been auctioned off, but the 30 megahertz for commercial uses has yet to be auctioned.
While Barton appears lukewarm to the idea of accelerating the DTV transition, the Spectrum Coalition for Public Safety is shopping a bill around Capitol Hill that would mandate that broadcasters give back their analog spectrum on Jan. 1, 2007, and that also would reduce the amount of spectrum available for commercial use.
The spectrum coalition is looking for a sponsor on legislation that would take 10 of the 30 megahertz designated by Congress for commercial interests and use it for public-safety data applications, bringing public-safety a total allocation of 34 megahertz.
“In this era of code-orange warnings, the capacity to rapidly deploy wireless broadband applications is absolutely essential to meet the public-safety and homeland-security needs of our nation and its communities,” according to a briefing paper available on the group’s Web site. “The technology for many of these applications already exists. But a significant barrier prevents their use. Unfortunately, current spectrum allocations do not provide sufficient bandwidth to enable these critical high-speed, next-generation technologies. The FCC is planning to auction critical broadcast bandwidth to private corporations. If this happens, it will be decades before high-speed wireless applications would be available to protect the public’s safety.”
Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.) said that a goal of the House telecommunications subcommittee should be to protect free-over-the-air TV. TV broadcasters have threatened that forcing them to offer only digital transmissions would deprive some people of free TV.
However, Robert Lee, president and general manager of WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Va., representing the National Association of Broadcasters, said that only a handful of stations have not turned on their digital signals, in part because of channel allocation issues with Canada.
Congress has become increasingly concerned about the status of the DTV transition. Last week, FCC Chairman Michael Powell said that after inching along, the DTV transition is now moving forward. The DTV transition “has really exploded,” said Powell. “We have really put together an aggressive plan.”
Once broadcasters give back their analog spectrum, commercial entities will have access to 30 megahertz of beachfront spectrum, but the Spectrum Coalition for Public Safety hopes to thwart the mobile-phone industry’s plan.
Their idea is not new. The FCC last year rejected a petition from Northrop Grumman Information Technology because the commission said it did not have the authority to make the change in the allocations. Northrop Grumman wanted to use the spectrum for a broadband data application aimed at pubic safety.
