Nextel’s Consensus Plan generating little static from public safety officials

With concern and debate over the growing problem of wireless network interference in the 800 MHz spectrum band at an unprecedented high, public safety officials say a solution can’t come quickly enough.

Interference has reached record levels this year, with 51 individual public safety agencies reporting interference at 117 unique locations through April 30, according to the Web site of public safety professionals group Project Consensus. At that rate, the group projects that by year’s end, public safety interference reports will top 350 locations, the highest one-year total to date.

“Having to deal with random interference is very hard on users, especially police,” said Dave Buchanan, network services manager for San Bernardino County, Calif., and chairman of Project Consensus’ spectrum committee. “You learn where the coverage is and where it isn’t—if you get used to it and then one day it isn’t there, that can become a very dangerous situation.” 

According to safety officials, interference is often a random outcome of wireless carriers’ ongoing network expansion—as new cell sites are built, the increased radio activity sometimes causes problems with existing public safety networks.

“We’ve always had dead spots, but some locations where we were previously unaware of problems we’ve now identified as dead spots as well,” said Steve Cooper, chief of the Technology and Support Division of the Denver Police Department. “Officers suddenly couldn’t transmit or receive information from those locations. We had 24 sites that were of concern from an officer safety standpoint. We took measurements and pinned it down to cellular interference.”

Cooper traced some, but not all, of the interference snafus to Nextel antennas. “Nextel really stepped up to the plate,” Cooper said. “Together we’ve tried things like filtering, re-tuning and turning the power on and off—we’ve been able to abate the problem in a number of sites, but not all of them.”

Both Cooper and Buchanan said they support the so-called Consensus Plan, under which Nextel would pay up to $850 million to relocate spectrum users with whom its services interfere. The plan also proposes that Nextel trade 16 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz and 900 MHz bands in exchange for 16 MHz of “cleaner” spectrum in the 1.9 GHz band.

Morgan O’Brien, founder and vice chairman of Nextel, and also the carrier’s point man on the interference issue, said the Consensus Plan progressed to the stage of FCC consideration because Nextel, public safety groups and private wireless spectrum owners were able to work cooperatively on a solution that met everyone’s best interests.

“When we first went out to different cities talk to public safety agencies about interference, we were told these groups hated us because of the problem,” O’Brien said. “They didn’t. They just wanted to talk about how to solve it.”

“The only solution is to separate the frequencies in the 800 MHz spectrum and implement a guard band,” Cooper said. “And we must ultimately make sure that other frequencies that interleaf don’t come in and cause the same problems.” 

According to Buchanan, competing proposals fail to address interference issues over the long run and in other spectrum bands. He said there must be clear and lasting separation between commercial and public safety interests: “The question comes down to this: Would you rather keep having continuous pain over a long period of time, or go through it one time and be done with it?”