Compliance: Who Cares?

A little more than a year ago, carriers and tower companies across the nation were scrambling to meet a Sept. 1, 2000, FCC deadline that ordered them to comply with certain RF-exposure guidelines.

As the dust settles on OET 65, a clearer picture of the regulations emerges: Although major carriers seem to have taken the deadline and new rules seriously, the FCC (www.fcc.gov) hasn't done much to enforce them.

“We haven't really gone out and done an exhaustive search for compliance because we don't have the resources to do that,” said Robert Cleveland, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology senior physical scientist. “We're a pretty small outfit here.”

Cleveland said the FCC has been unable to create a database of the hundreds of thousands of sites across the country and therefore has no statistics as to how many sites are or aren't in compliance with OET 65. But, he said, the lead RF enforcement person at the FCC is working to develop ways to check for compliance.

“He's developing a checklist that will be used by inspectors, so when they go out, they will be able to look for evidence of compliance-related activities,” Cleveland said.

It should be ready by year-end and will allow field personnel to look for RF-related problems in the course of their normal activities.

However, just because a uniform compliance procedure isn't complete doesn't mean the FCC is ignoring the deadline. Cleveland said the commission often gets calls from concerned members of the public who want a particular site checked for compliance. In such cases, inspectors visit the site, check RF levels and exposure and forward the information to the FCC enforcement office in Denver.

“Our Denver office would consult with us, and then we'd decide whether we'd need to go further with enforcement actions,” Cleveland said.

The FCC does have teeth it can bite with if a site isn't in compliance and the carrier isn't doing anything about it, but those teeth rarely are bared. Cleveland cited two broadcast stations in the Denver area that had been given notices of violation, which include fines for having high RF fields after the September deadline had passed.

Maintenance Mode

It appears most carriers took the new law seriously.

“The Sept. 1 deadline was difficult for everybody,” said Dennis Lawler, Verizon (www.verizon.com) network system performance director for North Florida. “We met that deadline. Now we do compliance studies on anything we're building or constructing before we bring it up on air.”

Lawler said Verizon now is focused on maintaining compliance and making sure new sites don't start off on the wrong foot.

“It just takes a lot of up-front work before we can bring a site on air to make sure it's in compliance,” he said. “That's a change for us because in the past, a lot of times we didn't do that.”

Nextel also worked hard to meet the deadline.

“We developed an in-house compliance (training) program that every employee was mandated to take,” said Michael Rapp, Nextel Partners (www.nextelpartners.com) director of engineering.

“When you talk about RF compliance, it's ongoing with changes being made to the network, with coverage-objective changes,” Rapp said. “It's not like you go through it once and say, ‘OK, we're in compliance.’ The training program, the measurements, the compliance reports and the signage are how we aggressively attacked getting into compliance.”

Before OET 65, those concepts were foreign to many carriers.

Cleveland said that by keeping an eye on the sales of equipment used in compliance, the FCC sees proof that most carriers are either in compliance or working toward it, despite the lack of hard data.

Equipment manufacturers told him they have been swamped with orders.

“That's evidence that companies are actually purchasing this equipment for their workers,” Cleveland said.

Now & Later

Companies such as Richard Tell Associates (www.radhaz.com), SiteSafe (www.sitesafe.com) and Comsearch (www.comsearch.com) all have seen business increase since OET 65 was created.

In fact, SiteSafe, a predictive-modeling software company, was founded in reaction to OET 65. The company does assessments for carriers to predict whether new sites will meet the FCC limits.

“We take measurements of all the antennas from a technical point of view,” said Wes McGee, SiteSafe president & CEO. “Then, we put that into our software and predict what the total amount of RF will be.”

SiteSafe's software can be used on existing sites, or it can predict levels at a planned site. After calculating the fields, the company recommends changes if the site isn't in compliance — moving antennas or developing walking paths or enclosures that will keep people out of the area.

Richard Tell, Richard Tell Associates president, said paths and fences often are just as important as antenna location because the guidelines relate to exposure and not to emissions.

“A lot of times people believe that just because they have high (RF) fields near an antenna, that site might be over the limits, and they're in violation,” Tell said. “That's not necessarily the case at all.”

Warning signs, paths and fences can sometimes achieve compliance without having to reduce RF levels.

The guidelines and exposure levels in place now work to keep the public safe from RF. However, Les Polisky, Comsearch director of field services, said compliance issues may become much more of a problem down the line.

“I'm not really sure whether our safety regulations are going to keep up with some of the technology that will occur, especially medical wireless applications,” Polisky said. “To me, that's something that we probably should be thinking about.”

Polisky said RF exposure becomes an important health issue if a person is relying on an electronic device to stay alive. He cited the early conflicts between pacemakers and microwave ovens.

Now, pacemakers are shielded so they are not affected, and microwaves put out lower RF emissions. But in the future, he believes that other sensitive monitoring devices will be developed for medical patients and might be affected by RF transmissions.

For now, though, Polisky and others in the industry are content to work with the regulations that went into effect last year, and the FCC is working to make sure carriers maintain their compliance.

“Generally speaking, I don't have any evidence that there's widespread noncompliance,” Cleveland said. “The bottom line is, with the limited resources we have, we're working on developing procedures to identify possible problems.”