Howard Buskirk

Competition is flourishing in the CMRS (commercial wireless) marketplace, the FCC said Thurs. in its annual CMRS competition report. In a development that was a surprise to carriers, FCC revealed that for the first time it’s doing an HHI analysis of competitiveness in individual regions, which is the analysis instrument the Justice Dept. uses.

The Tower Siting Policy Alliance, representing 2 tower companies and 3 major wireless carriers including Cingular, said in a filing at the FCC it would support a compromise offered by historic preservationists on the National Programmatic Agreement (NPA) on wireless towers, if that will lead to a successful agreement. The offer comes amidst reports the NPA may still get an FCC vote this week.

The committee that will select a transition administrator (TA) who will oversee the multiyear, multibillion dollar 800 MHz rebanding faces a Sept. 20 deadline for picking a firm or individual to run the process. Public safety sources said Tues. they're growing increasingly anxious about the time it will take them to reband and about the approaching deadlines. Nextel has yet to indicate whether it will agree to the terms of the order. “Most people don’t realize how quickly that committee is supposed to choose someone to oversee the rebanding,” said a carrier source. “It’s a tall order.”

Wireless carriers are meeting with all 5 FCC comrs. or their staff in an effort to delay consideration of a proposed H-block auction. They're getting together before Thurs. evening, when the item is expected to be placed on the sunshine agenda, cutting off further lobbying. But carriers say the odds are the FCC will schedule a vote as planned at the Sept. 9 meeting.

Motorola and the National Public Safety Telecom Council (NPSTC) clashed at the FCC last week over deployment of 4.9 GHz spectrum and the “mask” needed to minimize interference, as some public safety groups move toward deployment of this newly created band. Sources said once that critical issue is resolved they expect an FCC decision within 2 months.

Wireless carrier sources said Fri. concerns they expressed before a vote -- on when outage reports must be made and other issues -- weren’t addressed by the FCC, based on the order published by the Commission late Thurs. Carriers have a meeting planned this week to discuss the order and future strategy. Senior carrier sources said a petition for reconsideration is likely. “It’s clearly not what we were asking for,” one source said. The source said the biggest concerns focused on 2 issues. First, wireless carriers are raising red flags about the short deadline for reporting an outage -- within 2 hours a carrier learns of it. Second, wireless carriers believe the standard for a reportable event -- an outage on an MSC of at least 30 min. duration that meets or exceeds 900,000 “user-minutes” -- is not realistic. “It may be good in a wireline context,” the source said: “It’s not a very good metric for wireless where… no one unit is ever assigned to one switch.” FCC said in the order that wireless switching is similar enough to wireline to justify the same standard. “The circuit switch part of a MSC is very similar if not identical to a wireline switch, and the MSC’s traffic management function is based on the same statistical methods,” FCC said. “Thus, the switch capacity of an MSC is a stable element on which to calculate the number of users potentially affected by an outage.”

Nextel has begun to reach out to public safety to shed some light on its concerns about the 800 MHz rebanding order, released by the FCC Aug. 6. Nextel held a conference call last week with public safety officials, at which it made clear it has real reservations about the order as released. Sources told us Fri. that Nextel indicated some of the issues could be deal breakers, though public safety sources said they remain hopeful all can be addressed.

Wireless carriers disagree sharply over the possible benefits of the intercarrier compensation proposal filed this week by the Intercarrier Compensation Forum (ICF). The 2 independent wireless carriers that had participated in the talks, Western Wireless and T-Mobile, dropped out in May when negotiations hit a major bump in the road. But 2 of the remaining 9 participants -- Sprint and SBC -- have substantial wireless interests. Officials with both companies told us Thurs. they took those interests into consideration in supporting the ICF proposal.

The Dept. of Defense should work more closely with the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop technologies that can be used by first responders to respond to disasters, including new communications technologies, the National Academies’ National Research Council said in a report released Thurs. The report said the Army in particular should work more closely with first responders. “While many aspects of homeland security and homeland defense overlap, an extremely high correlation exists in the area of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR),” the report argued. “The committee believes that C4ISR is a high-payoff capability that offers great return on investment for the nation.” The report recommends the creation of a forum at the assistant secretary level to discuss how to best work together. The group observed: “Collaboration between the Army and DHS will be challenging because the organizational structure of DHS is still evolving and the Army is engaged in conflicts abroad.” Committee Chmn. John Lyons said: “Many of the needs of emergency response personnel could be addressed by technologies developed by the Army and other military services, so DHS and DoD should partner to answer these needs.”

NTIA told the FCC it should go slow on development of regulations allowing for use of interference temperatures as a metric -- a concept the Office of Engineering & Technology says could help measure and manage interference opening up more spectrum to unlicensed use for such things as wireless Internet.