FCC Searching for 800 MHz Rebanding Laggards

The agency has heard nothing from some licensees, David Furth, associate chief of the Public Safety Bureau and the FCC official overseeing rebanding, told a Tuesday APCO session. “There are a number of licensees that did not file requests for waivers,” he said. “They need to get in touch with us and tell us what their status is. We want to make sure that there are no licensees that are left out of the process.”

June FCC orders addressed some 500 requests to waive the June 26 rebanding deadline, but an unknown number of safety agencies did not seek additional time. Some licensees may not realize that “not only are they under deadline, they're past it,” Furth said. “They're going [be] in serious risk unless they come to us.” The number is more than a few, but Furth doesn’t know how large it is, he said. “These are generally small systems,” he told us. “We just need to be sure, check with Sprint, check with the [Transition Administrator]. Did they get done or did they miss the deadline?”

With systems in many regions linked, speakers expressed concerns that some systems are stalled because a neighboring system didn’t complete a rebanding plan. “We're actually stopping in some of the reconfigurations now,” said Chuck Jackson, vice president at Motorola. “We've gone through the subscriber base and we're ready to do the infrastructure [changes], but neighboring communities aren’t ready.”

The FCC knows of the problem, Furth said. “That’s why we've got the TA doing the regional planning sessions, it’s to really drill down into that issue,” he said. “What you really want to find out is who is the long pole in the tent in any region. There are a lot of small systems in some states that sort of piggyback on the statewide system… That’s what we're trying to identify. If there’s a long pole who is it and where are they, especially if they're driving other peoples’ timetables.”

In his APCO session Furth drew relatively few complaints, especially compared to his appearances at the last few annual meetings of the group. Two years ago, at APCO’s meeting in Orlando, public safety officials loudly complained that the rebanding was headed for a crash.

But some safety officials had complaints. David Smith, executive director of Indiana’s public radio system, said dealing with Sprint Nextel remains difficult as rebanding runs past the original three-year deadline. Smith’s system has had a proposal before Sprint for weeks and has heard nothing, he said. “I'm a little frustrated that we're hearing from the FCC, ‘You've got to this done,'” he said. “I think I felt almost insulted that we've been given lip service [from the FCC] about Sprint’s agreement to move forward. We're not getting responses from Sprint.” A consultant from Indiana said he’s working with several systems there and finds Sprint and the 800 MHz Administrator unresponsive. “We need some kind of mechanism, you know, a cattle prod, to push them along,” the official said.

Furth is hearing fewer complaints, he said. “There is a sense of more control but there is still a lot of work to do,” he said in an interview. “For those folks who are still in process, it’s an incredibly resource intensive and sometimes frustrating process. I don’t think all the frustration has gone away but I think for the most part people are focusing on let’s just get it done.”

Furth can’t say when the FCC and Mexico will come to terms on border reconfiguration, he said. The U.S. has a similar agreement with Canada allowing reconfiguration of systems along that border. Furth has been to Mexico four times in the last year for talks on the topic, he said. “We've made a lot of progress on a technical level on what a mockup bandplan for the border would look like,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s a State Department issue.” -- Howard Buskirk

APCO Notebook…

MSV was at APCO this week demonstrating a prototype for what it claims will be the first dual-band cellular and satellite phone, which isn’t much bigger than a standard cellphone. MSV’s message to APCO, as it has been to the FCC, was satellite must be part of any new wireless network for first responders. Jim Corry, MSV vice president, told reporters that he decided to take a position at MSV because of the promise offered by cheap, ubiquitous chips. “For $5 you can put a satellite chipset in virtually any device that public safety could possibly be carrying… This is how my CEO had lured me out of Nextel… Up to this point nobody has been able to mass distribute satellite phones to FEMA employees or emergency managers or other people who need satellite in times of disaster… You take a look catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina. It was satellite that really provided the bulk of the communications for the first three to five days after that hurricane went down. How can you have an emergency network without satellite in there someplace?” MSV contends in various FCC filings that a satellite component would make it cheaper to cover the most remote areas of the nation that would be the hardest to reach by other means. “If you're going to build it build it right, it certainly requires a satellite component to really meet the needs that public safety has,” Corry said. Corry, a former Secret Service agent, conceded that MSV and satellite operators need to do more outreach to public safety agencies. “We have a tremendous amount of education to do,” he said. “Public safety is a [land mobile radio] community. I was that way. For 22 years I carried a gun and a badge. I had a Motorola radio which was wired into my ear… If I couldn’t do it with a Motorola radio then it wasn’t worth doing was probably my attitude when I retired.” -- HB

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Study results released by CDW-Government show 67 percent of respondents from 20 major metropolitan areas did not know whether their local government had a community emergency alert notification system, officials said in a panel at the APCO annual conference. Houston Thomas, public safety business manager for CDW-G, said the survey results were consistent regardless of whether respondents were living in a city with a well-established emergency alerts notification system, such as Washington, D.C., or in a city just beginning to roll out a pilot project. The study asked how well respondents thought their government did in communicating with them during a disaster. Thomas attributed the low scores to a lack of awareness. He noted that 28 billion text messages were sent in June 2007, although in some cases there is still a reliance on TV, radio and other means for communicating during emergencies. Cities with higher rates of awareness were more likely to have sent emergency messages to residents in the last 12 months. While most respondents think they receive emergency messages from TV or radio, during Hurricane Katrina, text messaging was the most effective means for delivering information and worked well even in areas where cellphones had been destroyed, said Ned Ingraham, vice president of Cooper Notification/Roam Secure, and former chief information officer of the D.C. Emergency Management Agency.