Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski was on the road this week, giving the stump speech for the FCC?s ?looming spectrum crisis? tour. The bottom line is that smartphone demand is skyrocketing and that wireless broadband providers need more licenses down the line. Therefore, both carriers and regulators regularly eyeball the appetizing 300MHz of spectrum mostly reserved for over-the-air television broadcasters.
?Other countries ? our global competitors ? are focused on mobile opportunities in a way that simply hasn?t been true in the past,? Genachowski noted at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
?If we wait until there?s a crisis to reallocate spectrum, we?ll have waited too long?for consumers, for our global competitiveness?and I believe, for broadcasters,? he warned. ?Turning back to prior experience, what history shows us is that when broadcasters, the FCC, and Congress worked together in a straightforward and fair way that was focused on solving problems, we reached solutions that delivered tremendous benefits to our country.?That ?working together? bit hasn?t really come together so far. The idea is to get these licensees to agree to ?voluntary auctions? of about 120MHz of their spectrum, in which they?ll share in some of the auction revenue. There?s also the possibility of government-coordinated spectrum sharing, in which wireless ISPs would buy rights to extant DTV licenses?agreeing to a regimen of non-interference with broadcasters.
In the past, TV band license holders have been either cool or outright hostile to these proposals. But a day before Genachowski spoke, a small gaggle of NBC and CBS TV affiliate representatives met with the FCC?s top brass and suggested in very tentative language that they were ready to start thinking out loud about the problem.
Still, the word ?voluntary? has yet to be worked out.
When I'm not writing for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general, I teach United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. My idea of a good time is sitting in an Internet cafe reading a government filing. I know . . . get a life. But it's a cheap, safe form of entertainment.Follow @matthewlasar on Twitter.
Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/wireless-spectrum-standoff/
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