McDowell Wants President to Make Government Provide Cooperation on Federal Spectrum Reallocation

With government-used spectrum, “we don’t know how efficiently the federal government is using that,” which accounts for about 60 percent of the “best spectrum,” McDowell said on The Communicators. “That is sort of the biggest, fattest target, the lowest hanging fruit, to look at” for reallocation, he said. “With the stroke of a pen in the West Wing of the White House, executive branch agencies can really redouble their efforts to try to find spectrum to bring to auction. And we can actually find out the actual cost of how much it will cost to move federal users."

Congress, the FCC and the White House “all have a responsibility here,” McDowell said. “I want to know what the costs really are.” An executive order would speed the process of identifying costs, he said. The NTIA’s “excellent” and “very thoughtful report” had to rely on estimates from other agencies, the Republican commissioner noted. There was “no way of following up on those assumptions, to drill down on them, to make sure they're accurate,” he said, saying “nobody wants to give up their spectrum.” The NTIA never probed the administration or industry on the $18 billion cost estimate, which McDowell said earlier this month is a “large price tag” not to be taken at “face value” (CD May 9 p6).

Frequencies are a “very valuable resource,” so there’s “a disincentive to give a low cost figure or something that is truly at cost” for relocation expenses, McDowell said. What’s needed is “an executive order or something at the very highest levels of the West Wing of the White House, we need some buy-in there,” he said. “I think that’s what ultimately this NTIA report points toward.” Spokespeople for the FCC and White House had no comment. Agencies worked with examiners from the Office of Management and Budget to provide cost estimates, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling told a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bm8e9h). The report showed that even if it might have cost a few billions dollars less and taken a few years less time if “more detailed cost reviews had been done,” it “doesn’t solve our problem, which is that’s too much money and it takes too long,” he said. Strickling sought a “new paradigm for how we find new spectrum for commercial use."

NTIA’s report “ultimately” shows that vacating the 1755-1850 MHz band “will be very expensive and take too much time,” a spokeswoman said Thursday. “We need a new approach.” It’s “natural” that the “agencies that purchase and operate the array of systems that utilize spectrum would know best the cost of planning, redesigning systems, and purchasing equipment,” she said. “The agencies worked together with their OMB examiners to ensure that estimates follow appropriate methods. However, estimating costs and time frames to move to unknown new bands and to develop new technologies for diverse systems is a complicated task.” The NTIA’s “overarching goal is to make more spectrum available for commercial use as quick as possible and in a cost-efficient manner,” the spokeswoman said. “Our proposed approach, that relies on a combination of sharing and relocation, can save time and taxpayer dollars by allowing some of the large and complicated federal operations to remain in the band.”

Flexible use of spectrum and secondary markets are ways to promote efficient use, McDowell said in the C-SPAN interview. GPS receivers for instance “have really big ears, like Dumbo the elephant, and they are sort of hearing more than they should” in picking up interference from other bands, he said. “We haven’t had a very robust or defined receiver standard policy, and we need to have one, and I think that will help spectral efficiency.” McDowell noted he backed the FCC having held a March workshop on receiver standards, and voted to approve an order last month letting TV stations share channels once the commission holds a voluntary incentive auction of broadcast TV channels since 3 MHz -- half what each station has now -- is the most needed for HD transmissions.

McDowell said “it will be hard in some cases to free up as much spectrum as had been advertised” in that auction, given 10 stations would need to go off-air to free up 60 MHz of frequencies in a market. “But maybe if there is money in it for them, enough money, they will be up for that,” he said. The government can make it easier to have secondary spectrum markets by allowing license sales as long as the deals meet public interest and antitrust standards, McDowell said. The government ought to “get out of the way” of advances or “facilitate” ways to “help squeeze more efficiency out of the airwaves as they already exist,” he said. “Otherwise, consumers are going to be very frustrated in the years to come.” They're “very frustrated right now that their mobile devices, their smartphones, are working so slowly” in downloading data, he said. Auctions “can take a long time,” he said: It was two years between DTV legislation passing and an auction of the analog frequencies broadcasters vacated, “about as quick” as possible, he said.

McDowell’s eager for the FCC to finish its USF rulemaking on changing how companies contribute to the fund, which, like spectrum proceedings, he said, has momentum. Last year’s order on payments from USF to companies “flattened the spending curve on a federal entitlement in Washington -- I don’t know when the last time was we could say those words” in the city, and now “we'll see where the record goes” on contributions, he said. There’s a “rebuttable presumption in my head that phone numbers is a good place to go next” on how to base contributions to USF, “because of our statutory authority” and “it also broadens the base,” McDowell said. “It keeps it squarely within traditional telecommunications. But there are a number of entities that want a carve out” from some fees like universities, he said. “There are a lot of folks who aren’t paying now who might be paying” into USF in some scenarios, which is “what makes it controversial,” he continued. “I hope that it’s a broader base and a lower rate. It’s better to take a little bit from a lot of folks, rather than a lot from a few. Sort of a flat-tax type concept.”