AM and FM Spectrum Sit Out FCC Repurposing Quest

Staff at the FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative are “looking primarily at the prime mobile bands of 300 MHz to 3 GHz and radio isn’t in that range,” a commission spokesman said. “It is a limited amount of spectrum, so it’s not a priority anyway.” Other commission officials said they were aware of no efforts by Blair Levin, the initiative’s executive director, or colleagues to evaluate AM and FM spectrum.

“It would seem to me that it’s almost a no-brainer given the small amount of spectrum involved and the vast amount of [radio] receivers” in use, said engineer Charles Jackson of Jackson Telecom Consulting. “The TV band has much more spectrum in it and it’s probably the case that changing technology offers many more ways to free up spectrum in the TV band than in the AM and FM bands.” AM spectrum is “still a viable revenue source for a lot of station owners -- not every AM station is dying,” Senior Engineer Mark Peabody of Cavell Mertz said. “In a lot of places that’s the only spectrum available to broadcasters and it’s experienced almost a rebirth in some cases.”

There are far fewer TV stations than radio stations, said engineer Ed DeLaHunt, whose family owns eight FM and AM broadcast outlets in Minnesota. “It’s pure numbers.” Unlike broadcast TV, “the radio broadcast operator doesn’t rely on any other form of distribution to reach their listeners,” noted Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner of Emmis. “They have to justify the use of that spectrum when other distributors are reaching more households with content” directly.

Arbitron’s most recent radio study found that 91 percent of Americans over age 12 listen, said a spokeswoman. Nielsen’s estimate for U.S. “broadcast-only” TV homes is 11.3 million, or 9.8 percent of them, said a spokeswoman. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2005 that 19 percent of U.S. households rely on terrestrial TV, an NAB spokesman noted. “Whether it’s 10 million or 20 million, that’s still a heck of a lot of homes that rely exclusively on over-the-air television for a critical and often lifeline service.”

“No one’s approached me about radio repackaging or bandwidth reallocation like you've seen in television,” Brenner said. Nor have FCC officials approached CTO Mike Starling of National Public Radio about using the bandwidth for other purposes. “It just wouldn’t make sense,” Brenner said. “I've never heard a mention of radio spectrum being made available for broadband purposes, and I would attribute that to the fact that people looking at spectrum understand that virtually 100 percent of the radio audience gets their radio from over-the-air spectrum,” Starling added. “I can’t imagine a time in the future that radio broadcast spectrum would be considered as a potential point for deployment of wireless broadband technologies.”

There’s “just no gold in them there hills” in terms of plentiful AM and FM spectrum, said President Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Finding vacant radio waves set aside for government use is difficult, so “at least in the short-term, all the action is in the broadcast TV band,” he added.

The radio industry has far greater fears than having spectrum taken away, lawyers representing radio broadcasters said. Inside and outside the FCC, there doesn’t seem to be much demand to use AM-band spectrum for other purposes, a veteran attorney said. In most parts of the U.S., the FM band is considered to be heavily congested, said the lawyer and radio executives. “The radio industry’s danger is not a forced sell-back of its spectrum,” lawyer John Garziglia of Womble Carlyle said. “Rather, radio’s danger is the slow, steady diminution of the listenability of its signals, due to substandard AM/FM receivers and antennas in favor of satellite radio, and due to imminent potential interference from the HD [Radio] power increase.”