Debate heats up on the Hill over sale of public safety spectrum

Does the country need to allocate more scare spectrum so people can use their iPhones at max speed everywhere, or should it be reserved for public safety communications?

That's what officials at the Federal Communications Commission, Congress, and police and fire departments nationwide debated on Thursday at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. They reached no formal agreement, however.

The subcommittee wants to auction off to commercial cellular carriers 10 megahertz of spectrum, the 758-763 MHz and 788-793 MHz bands, known as the D-Block, which Congress originally allocated in 1997 to public safety agencies. Panel members want to use the proceeds of the auction, along with monies from two other spectrum sales, to pay for the construction and operation of an $11 billion national public safety broadband network.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Commerce Committee, said the draft 2010 Public Safety Act calls for the federal government to finance 80 percent of the construction costs of the national network and 50 percent of its ongoing costs.

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chairman of the subcommittee, said the sale of D-Block would meet the single biggest challenge to the development of a national public safety network: financing.

FCC noted in a white paper it released on Tuesday that public safety does not require the additional spectrum, because state and local agencies have more spectrum than they need "on a day-to-day and emergency basis."

And in a worst-case emergency scenario, an additional 10 MHz of spectrum reserved for public safety agencies would not meet their needs, wrote Jon Peha, chief technologist at FCC. Instead, first responders would need priority access to commercial cellular networks, which Peha called a "cost-effective way to improve the resilience of public safety communications, along with its capacity, in a way that a single network cannot provide."

But the Waxman-Boucher bill met opposition from Charles Dowd, deputy chief of the New York City Police Department's communications division. He said plans to sell off D-Block make for "fatally flawed legislation."

Dowd said he was speaking on behalf of a range of state and local government organizations and numerous public safety groups, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the National Emergency Management Association, the National Governors Association, and the National Conference of State Legislatures, among others.

Because D-Block lies adjacent to existing frequencies allocated to public safety groups, it "can provide needed additional capacity simply and elegantly, without complicating network or handset design," Dowd said. "Any alternative spectrum offered will be less desirable since additional components would be required, which would dramatically increase the cost while reducing performance."

The D-Block will support broadband data and video communications as well as voice communications over advanced, high-speed cellular networks based on commercial technology known as Long-Term Evolution, he said. "The D Block is the cornerstone of the mission-critical voice foundation; without it, a mission-critical voice and data network would not be possible," he told the hearing.

Jonathan Moore, director of fire and EMS operations and GIS services for the International Association of Fire Fighters, disagreed and endorsed the Waxman-Boucher bill. "Affordability is key to making any network interoperable on a nationwide level," he said.

A public safety broadband network would not resolve the interoperability problems highlighted by poor firefighter communications in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Moore added. "It was the limited effectiveness of low-powered radios in use at the Twin Towers combined with an extremely high volume of communications traffic that prevented firefighters from receiving the call to evacuate," he said. "Widespread claims that a broadband network would have saved lives on that tragic day are simply not true."

Dowd and his public safety consortium intend to back a rival bill, the 2010 Broadband for First Responders Act, introduced by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee. The bill would allocate the D-Block to public safety, noting that "is the only assured way of meeting public safety's needs for sufficient spectrum, and would help reduce the complexity and future operating costs of public safety communications systems."

The King bill has 24 co-sponsors, including Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., vice chairman of the Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee.