A profound — but predictably understandable — policy shift has been evolving since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and horrific hurricanes four years later.
Public safety, organically ingrained in and the higher calling component of the Communications Act, already had sacred cow status before 9/11. Now, public safety is overlaid — explicitly and otherwise — on telecom policy across the board. Perhaps no other sector has felt it more than the wireless industry. The once bright line separating public safety and commercial wireless communications has become forever blurred. Indeed, it is getting increasingly difficult to tell where public safety policy begins and cellphone policy ends. Jurisdictions are overlapping. A fundamental morphing is underway.
The evolution
Wireless priority access service rules, launched in 2000, proved to be just the beginning. The fire drill to get priority access rolled out throughout the country served as a microcosm of what would ensue on a far broader scale for wireless carriers and others. Added emphasis was given to improving enhanced 911, public-safety interoperability, network reliability and emergency alert service. Urgency was also given to fixing commercial wireless interference to 800 MHz public-safety communications and propping up the mobile satellite service sector, whose severe financial woes had threatened to put it out to pasture. MSS was given a boost by policymakers who wanted more communications redundancy in the post-911 world. So the FCC agreed to let MSS licensees supplement space-based facilities with terrestrial-based cellular networks. The mobile-phone industry protested loudly, but homeland security politics carried the day.
The homeland security mission creep put wireless carriers, already spending billions of dollars for additional spectrum and network upgrades, in a precarious position. As a practical matter, they could not outwardly balk at taking on additional responsibilities assigned to them in the name of defending the homeland. Doing so would come off as unpatriotic, and policymakers could not easily let cellphone carriers — which today serve more than 254 million subscribers with highly sophisticated, Web-enabled wireless devices — completely off the hook. In past years, the cellular industry faced the same dilemma in working with the FBI to improve wiretap capability under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. These days, more than even, national cellphone carriers and their parent companies find themselves being tapped on their shoulders to help the U.S. government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or via the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program.
There is a competitive component to it all, as well. Wireless carriers have to be careful that one or more of their brethren do not gain an edge by being first to bring a wireless homeland security application to market. As such, operators have largely remained unified in deciding whether to move forward or hold the line on any given new federal mandate that is imposed.
And, yes, the wireless industry has pushed back at times. Sprint Nextel Corp. appealed the FCC’s 800 MHz rebanding decision. Cellular industry association CTIA, with backing from wireless infrastructure group PCIA and others, challenged the FCC’s eight-hour backup power rule for cell sites. Wireless carriers said they will take the FCC to court over its 911 location accuracy policy.
But industry has been at the receiving end of lawsuits, dozens of them alleging illegal privacy invasion in class actions against AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel. The suits flow from the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretap program.
Public safety has proved a double edged sword for the FCC’s Martin, at once praised first responders and criticized by the wireless industry for various decisions by the GOP-led commission. Meantime, Martin remains under fire from Democrats who control Congress over the question of alleged privacy violations by regulated telecom carriers that have been the administration’s partner in the latter’s anti-terrorist wiretap effort.
Martin’s public-safety record, though, is not apt to be determined by the outcome of the 800 MHz rebanding or backup power litigation, or even by whether the FCC figures a way to improve spotty in-building and rural E-911 location accuracy. Rather, his legacy is more likely to be shaped by whether the FCC can entice someone from private sector to team up with first responders to build a nationwide 700 MHz public safety-commercial broadband network. If not, Martin’s public-safety record — as well as the revenue record-breaking 700 MHz auction itself — will be stained with a asterisk. It’s doubtful the Bush administration’s $1 billion pubic-safety interoperability grant program will do the trick, though it’s a step in the right direction. If left as unfinished business, nationwide public-safety broadband deployment will remain a mighty challenge for Martin’s successor, Congress and the next president of the United States.
