WASHINGTON-With a little more than a month to go before an implementation plan is delivered to President George W. Bush, the federal government has yet to decide which spectrum will be used for a federal/non-federal spectrum-sharing test bed.
“We haven’t come to a firm agreement with the FCC as to what this spectrum might be, what the new technologies are,” said John Kneuer, deputy assistant Commerce secretary for communications and information.
While an official with the Federal Communications Commission had previously reportedly listed some potential frequencies to be used in the test bed, that official was not present at the luncheon where Kneuer was the keynote speaker.
“We have been identifying a list of frequencies,” Kneuer told the Land Mobile Communications Council. “A lot of that will be driven by what we hear about emerging technology.”
The idea of the test bed, said Kneuer, is to reverse spectrum-management procedures of the past where innovative technologies like ultra-wideband had to prove they could share spectrum with incumbent users without causing interference.
“The point of the test bed is to say that we have a place where you can put in new technologies with the anticipation that you are going to share the spectrum; you are not going to have an exclusive right to this spectrum, you are going to share,” said Kneuer.
The spectrum-sharing test bed was one of the recommendations endorsed by President Bush last fall. In an executive memorandum, Bush set out specific benchmarks to be met to implement the recommendations he received from a spectrum task force he created in 2003. According to the executive memo, the National Telecommunications & Information Administration must come up with an implementation plan within six months or by the end of May.
Kneuer, who is deputy NTIA administrator, told reporters after his luncheon speech, that he does not think the implementation schedule will be very specific about the test bed.
“The implementation plan that we will be delivering to the president sets out how we plan to execute all of the recommendations. That is a recommendation of the report so it will include a section that says, ‘Here are the steps we plan to implement the test bed,’ ” said Kneuer. “It could very well say, ‘Here is the process we are going to go through to identify the bands,’ but it will definitely lay out how we are going to go about implementing the test bed.”
