Public safety community unconvinced by new FCC report

The public safety community remains unconvinced by a report issued this week from the Federal Communications Commission that aims to justify the FCC’s plan involving a nationwide public safety network.

“It’s flawed in many aspects,” said Harlan McEwen, chairman of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, the license holder for the 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that was granted to the public safety community years ago. McEwen said he was still reviewing the report issued yesterday and declined to provide details but added, “It makes a number of false assumptions.”

Richard Mirgon, president of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials was more blunt. “I’ve read fiction that has more substance to it than the report does,” he said.

The public safety community has argued that 10 MHz of spectrum is not enough for its needs and wants the FCC to give it an additional 10 MHz of spectrum in the adjacent D-block.
In the report issued this week, the FCC argues that 10 MHz is enough spectrum for public safety under regular conditions. During an emergency, the FCC proposes to let the public safety community use commercial 700 MHz networks on a priority roaming basis. This would include the D-block, which would be auctioned to a commercial operator. In total, the FCC argues, this approach would give public safety access to 80 MHz of spectrum.

But Mirgon said, “There’s not a device made that can give us 80 MHz of useable spectrum.”

Andrew Seybold, president of the eponymous wireless consulting firm, is in the process of writing a rebuttal to the new FCC report and pointed to several problems with it. “They are basing their assumptions on things they have no control over,” Seybold said. For example, he said, capacity requirements are calculated based on the assumption that buildings would be required to have wireless infrastructure such as femtocells inside them. But he said, “The FCC has no ability to force those changes.”

Seybold has argued previously that in major metropolitan areas public safety would need more than 10 MHz of spectrum on a daily basis, and he said the new report does nothing to refute that. The report does argue that in major emergencies public safety would need more than 20 MHz — and Seybold agreed with that finding. In that situation, the public safety community, like the FCC, recommends that public safety personnel should be able to roam onto commercial networks.

The new FCC report has at least one backer: the Rural Cellular Association. But what the RCA seems to like about the plan are the handset interoperability and mandatory roaming requirements, which would help small wireless carriers compete more effectively against the major nationwide operators. “In order to bring broadband to consumers and public safety, especially those in rural areas, the FCC must ensure full utilization of the 700 MHz band by mandating data roaming and requiring that all equipment have the capability to access all paired spectrum in the band,” said Steven K. Berry, president and CEO of the RCA.

Several public safety associations recently banded together to launch an ad campaign advocating that the D-block should be given to public safety. “We have to stop feeding public safety scraps from the dinner table,” Mirgon said. “We need to provide public safety with sufficient spectrum to accomplish the mission of protecting Americans.”