Bureau Likely to Give FCC Ranking of D-Block Options, Barnett Says
All options remain on the table for the 700 MHz D-block, Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett told reporters Thursday. Bureau officials said, meanwhile, that it’s unclear when the 800 MHz rebanding, ongoing for five years, will be completed. Barnett has been at the FCC only since late July.
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Barnett said his priorities as bureau chief include communications interoperability, cybersecurity, E-911 deployment, emergency alerts and protecting communications infrastructure. But the future of the D-block, an issue on which the commission punted last year, dominated questions from reporters. Twelve cities and other areas have petitioned the FCC seeking early use of the 700 MHz band while the agency develops rules for a national public safety wireless broadband network.
“Right now we are looking at the options,” Barnett said. “Really everything is on the table.” Barnett said his instruction to the staff is: “Come up with wild ideas. Come up with the innovative things. What are the variations on that? I've asked for what are the various risks. What are all the factors that we need to take care of and how does each option play in that.”
Barnett said it’s unclear when the bureau will make recommendations to commissioners on whether to hold another auction of the spectrum or possibly ask Congress to change the law so the block can be reallocated directly to public safety. “I'm sure at some point [commissioners] are going to ask for some type of ranking of what the options are,” he said. “We need to be able to tell them why something may have a higher priority. What are the factors, the pros and cons. … There are a lot of factors that we're looking at.”
Barnett said the bureau completed a top-down review of public safety preparedness, as required by Chairman Julius Genachowski, submitting a report to him July 30. “Every office of the commission was involved with that,” Barnett said. “It was comprehensive. Some of our people said they burned the midnight oil. They used it all up. They went out and bought candles and burned them at both ends. It was a very significant review.” Genachowski was focused on “things to make us more ready” when he reviewed the report, Barnett said, adding, “I feel good about where we are.”
Asked about the ongoing 800 MHz rebanding, Barnett deferred to Deputy Chief David Furth for a status report, saying only, “the thing I'm interested in is that we continue to make progress.”
Furth said public safety licensees given a delay until October have yet to start asking for more time. “I would expect we will see most of those in September,” Furth said. “I would expect we will get still a fairly significant number of requests for permission to extend the time past October. I can’t really say at this point how we're going to address them.” “The good news,” Furth said, is that some regions, including Colorado and Utah, have completed the rebanding and others are close. “Then there are other regions that are going to take a longer time because they have large and complex systems,” he said. “We want to continue to push people along to move as quickly as possible, but we understand that there are variations in what is possible depending on the complexity of the systems and interoperability relationships that different jurisdictions are dealing with.”
Furth said it’s unclear when the FCC will complete negotiations with Mexico on rebanding the regions that share a border. “It has taken longer than we hoped, obviously,” he said. “We've been continuing to have really quite detailed discussions with Mexico, in conjunction with the State Department, and with licensees. The good news is that those details are really about the kinds of technical details of how do we do this. This is not a question of whether we do it. It’s a question of how we do it.”
Barnett, a supporter of President Barrack Obama during the election and retired Navy admiral, said he applied for a job in the administration but not at the FCC. In the last administration, former Chairman Kevin Martin appointed a former police chief as first head of the bureau. “I did not seek this job. It sought me,” Barnett said. “I'm not a communications lawyer. I've not really done anything with or for the FCC. … There are parallels at least with regard to work for readiness and preparedness that I've done in the Navy pretty much all my professional life, that may have direct application with what we do here.”