March 2010 MHz Update: FCC unveils D-Block plan

By Doug Wyllie
EMS1 Staff

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission has officially unveiled an audacious $20 billion, 10-year plan to build a new, low-cost national wireless broadband network. The newly-revised FCC plan includes a proposal to spend as much as $16 billion in the next decade to build and operate a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network through which emergency responders would share information during incidents requiring multi-agency response.

To help fund the public safety network, the FCC has asked Congress institute to a user fee for the nation’s roughly 70 million broadband subscribers.

“Over the past 20 years, we have gotten much better at working with each other at the local, state, and federal levels. The Fusion Centers — particularly the all-crime fusion centers that came into being after 9/11 — are a significant step forward,” Chief William Bratton, LAPD (ret.) said.

“We are learning the benefits of sharing information among ourselves. I think that as departments face personnel issues, while at the same time no diminishing of issues that have to be addressed, the need to work cooperatively — the need to work in partnership and in task forces — is going to become more critical than ever.”

If ever there was a time to respond to American public safety forces in terms of giving them the capabilities to coordinate among themselves, now would be the time, according to Bratton. “If we don’t get that D-Block now, we’ll never get it,” he said. “It’ll make it more difficult in years ahead to coordinate our activities among each other when there’s going to be increasing need for a variety of reasons.”

According to numerous reports, including this one from the Wall Street Journal, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski dispatched a team of aides to visit with telecommunications industry representatives and consumer groups to pre-brief them before the official unveiling expected to happen sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday.

As we’ve previously reported, the effort to build a nationwide interoperable broadband communications network for public safety has been a 15-year process. When the FCC’s wireless spectrum auction came to a close two years ago, the D-Block had garnered just one bid of $472 million, far short of its reserve price of $1.33 billion. In that same FCC auction, the four remaining Blocks raised nearly $20 billion.

At that time, a small handful of industry watchers — yours truly included — advocated for the public safety network to be funded at least in part through proceeds of that $20 billion federal windfall from “Auction 73" or other FCC auctions to be held in the future. The FCC is warming up to that idea, but as the Journal points out near the end of its coverage of the issue this morning, “Congress, not the FCC, decides how to spend money raised in spectrum auctions and lawmakers have historically used the money for deficit reduction or to offset other spending. It isn’t clear if lawmakers will agree with the FCC on how to spend proceeds from future auctions.”

Critical importance
Whether it’s a mass casualty incident with hundreds of agencies responding (think 9/11 or Katrina), or an ongoing investigation involving a handful of agencies and disciplines, the creation of a national wireless broadband public safety network is of critical importance for their collective success.

“The issue of a successful resolution from a public safety standpoint is very much in doubt,” Bratton said. “The momentum that had been building in our favor has been lost. And again, the irony is that right when we could use it most — more than any other time in our history — we’re watching it slip through our grasp. I don’t know if there’s a full appreciation of how critical this issue is.”

TMCnet, a widely-read online journal for the technology industry, points out that the “existing U.S. public safety wireless infrastructure consists of thousands of disparate systems built by separate local agencies. Problems with interoperability, cost, spectral efficiency, and limited functionality plague these systems but could be significantly reduced through the deployment of a single nationwide network that serves all public safety personnel. This can be achieved by having a nationwide interoperable public safety wireless broadband network in place and the cost of deploying such a network is more or less going to equal to the cost of maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructures.”

Ultimately, however, the new FCC plan — which was mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009 — is about more than the issue of a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network (for a three-minute summary, check out the video above in which Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus and Co., talks with Bloomberg reporter Margaret Brennan about the FCC proposal). In short, the FCC aims to “connect 100 million households to affordable 100-megabits-per-second service, building the world’s largest market of high-speed broadband users and ensuring that new jobs and businesses are created in America.”

In so doing, the agency proposes to spend a great deal of taxpayer money, and as a consequence, the acceptance of the FCC plan remains anything but certain. A hearing is expected to be held on March 25 by the House subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet. If you’re so motivated, you can write to your Congressional representative by visiting the House of Representatives site and entering your home zip code.