NAB urged the FCC to deny Cricket...

NAB urged the FCC to deny Cricket a waiver of protection criteria to deploy a lower 700 MHz A block license in the Chicago basic economic area. The carrier failed to satisfy the legal standard for a waiver of the commission’s rules, NAB said in a reply in docket 14-17 (http://bit.ly/OCos99). The association also asked the FCC to reject T-Mobile’s recommendation that TV licensees should negotiate in good faith with a wireless licensee interested in exploring operations near TV and DTV stations transmitting on channels 51-68 (http://bit.ly/1d0Oiib). The current rules impose no obligation on a broadcaster to negotiate with a wireless carrier seeking to short-space its operations, NAB said. A broadcaster’s refusal to negotiate “causes no hardship to the wireless carrier seeking to short-space its operations,” it said. What T-Mobile seeks isn’t merely a grant of the waiver Cricket requested, but “for the commission to treat Cricket’s request as a blueprint for widespread future waivers for operating outside the parameters” of the current rule, it said. The Competitive Carriers Association urged the commission to grant Cricket’s request. Granting the waiver would facilitate the deployment of unutilized wireless spectrum “when the demand for wireless services is at an all-time high and only expected to become more acute,” CCA said (http://bit.ly/1hCskzs). The broadcasters would have the commission completely ignore the interests of American consumers “who are clamoring for additional wireless capacity,” it said. Cricket makes a compelling showing “that even assuming a successor carrier has greater coverage and more subscribers, the interference potential is, at most, de minimis,” CCA said. NAB’s and 21st Century Fox’s Fox Television Stations’ misrepresentations of the purpose of DTV protection requirements reflect an unreasonable expectation of absolute interference protection “for broadcast signals that the commission has previously acknowledged is not the intent of the rule,” Laser said on behalf of itself and the successor in interest of Leap and Cricket (http://bit.ly/1gR2eXU). AT&T this month got FCC approval to buy Cricket and Leap, and completed the deal (CD March 14 p5). The parties haven’t effectively rebutted the strong evidence that only a de minimis number of viewers in Chicago are likely to be affected by enabling 700 MHz A block operations, it said. The Fox stations’ use of the Longley-Rice prediction model in its interference study isn’t applicable to wireless operations, Laser said. The FCC has long understood that the model was designed for that static environment of broadcast transmissions, “and does not accurately predict interference by mobile wireless transmitters or distances of less than one kilometer,” it said.