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The Spectrum Wars
by Drew Clark
After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers Sept. 11, 2001, firefighters and police officers could not communicate with each other by radio. Minutes after the south tower's collapse, police helicopters warned that the north tower's collapse was inevitable and urged an evacuation, but firefighters heard nothing. Of the 343 firefighters who died that day, 121 were in the north tower, and many were close to safety.
On Capitol Hill, that communications failure has become a potent cry for legislative action. The independent panel that investigated the attacks called for the reassignment of broadcast spectrum to public-safety officials in order to make their systems "interoperable."
The broadcasters have prevented such a transfer in the past, including after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. But now the idea has new supporters in the Senate and new momentum with a bill by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and Connecticut Democrat Joseph Lieberman to implement the so-called 9/11 Commission's recommendation.
"I'm not speaking against the broadcasters," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said at a Sept. 8 hearing that McCain's committee held on his bill. "I'm shouting against the broadcasters. I'm sick and tired of their excuses for not allowing us to have a way to protect the 1.2 million men and women who ... cannot today communicate with each other."
A Legendary Show Of Lobbying Muscle
The communications failures in the mid-1990s led to the formation of the Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee in 1995, and it had one key recommendation for Congress and the executive branch. "Unless immediate measures are taken to alleviate spectrum shortfalls and promote interoperability, public-safety agencies will not be able to adequately discharge their obligation to protect life and property," said its report, which was released Sept. 11, 1996.
Five years later, first responders did not have the frequencies they needed. Congress did reserve space for nearly 1,000 new voice channels in 1997. But the deal included a fatal caveat: public safety could only get them when television broadcasters moved out of those airwaves.
For the past three years, Weldon has pushed for action on a bill that would evict broadcasters from stations 63, 64, 68 and 69 as of Dec. 31, 2006. The FCC set those channels aside for public safety once the transition to digital television is complete, but the bill has languished in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Many technology obstacles stand in the way of ensuring interoperable communication. But the scarcity of what FCC Chairman Michael Powell called "saving lives spectrum" remains one of the biggest factors in the debate. And broadcasters, a legendary power on Capitol Hill by nature of their presence in all 435 congressional districts, have long lobbied to keep other industries out of the frequencies reserved for them.
Testifying before House Energy and Commerce, Powell said that wresting 108 megahertz of spectrum -- the mother lode of "beachfront property" airwaves -- from the broadcasters is his key remaining priority as chairman. "It is more than urgent," he said. "It is too late, and every day it is that much more too late."
The Changing Mood
The mood that has favored broadcasters may be changing. A collection of once-disparate interests including the public-safety community, cellular carriers, nonprofit advocates and technology companies are combining forces to call for freeing the broadcast spectrum. Particularly in an election year where broadcasters are increasingly under the spotlight, the coalition could succeed.
Besides public safety, which wants its 24 megahertz, wireless carriers want to buy at least 36 megahertz to deploy services for its 169 million customers.
Witness the controversy surrounding the spectrum swap that the FCC approved in July: Nextel Communications and rival Verizon Communication fought each other bitterly for the right to claim 10 megahertz of frequencies inferior to that of the broadcasters. The FCC sided with Nextel but required the company to shell out assets valued at $4.8 billion for the frequencies.
Technology companies and public-interest advocates like the Media Access Project are on board, too. In the near future, Intel Chief Technology Officer Patrick Gelsinger told McCain's committee, "every electronic device will include a radio, and there will be an explosion in the number of wireless devices used for communication, commercial, medical, entertainment and numerous other purposes." The biggest obstacle, he said, is television broadcasters.
Signals at their frequencies are cheap to send and easy to receive, and they pass through walls, trees and high-rise buildings. Gelsinger plugged a plan, tentatively approved by the FCC in May, to allow wireless, high-speed Internet connections on vacant broadcast frequencies.
"Trust me, there are a lot of other people who want your stuff and who want it to do creative and interesting things," Powell told broadcasters at their Las Vegas convention in April. Without a plan to orderly depart that spectrum, he said. "government forces will combine to yank it back."
Inching Toward A Digital World
All of those controversies inevitably circle back to the transition to digital television that first began in 1987. After 10 years, the FCC set a standard, and then Congress loaned every television station a second six-megahertz channel to simultaneously broadcast both digital and analog pictures. That was to continue until December 2006, or when 85 percent of Americans could receive digital broadcasts, whichever came later.
But consumers have been slow to purchase digital televisions, and when they do, almost all hook them to cable and satellite systems that do not use broadcast frequencies. Of all Americans, 88 percent now pay for television.
The situation has created an impasse as broadcasters have fought battle after battle against cable operators, satellite systems, electronics companies and public-interest critics. Congress rebuffed Powell's first attempt to clear broadcasters out of the public-safety channels in 2002, after the agency approved a plan where broadcasters like Paxson Communications would reap billions of dollars from the sale of their channels.
Powell has put forward a new plan, however, that aims to end the transition by December 2008. First floated in April as a draft plan of the agency's Media Bureau, the FCC proposal would end the transition by declaring that digital broadcast signals sent via cable or satellite meet the 1997 law's 85-percent requirement. Without such an interpretation, broadcasters could use the spectrum for decades.
Speaking last week at a breakfast for reporters, Powell said his previous plan "was only about channels for public safety. This is about the whole [digital television] banana, and putting 50 to 70 billion dollars from the proceeds" of an auction back into the hands of Congress.
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