ADMINISTRATION'S PROPOSED SPECTRUM BILL'S PENDING, CTIA IS TOLD

Besides a pending legislative proposal on private, nonauctioned spectrum, Victory said that “as far as government goes, that is something we are very actively looking at” in terms of how to promote more efficient uses, although she said no final conclusions had been reached on how best to do that. In general, Victory said: “We should be looking for market-based incentives for efficient use, or we should be looking at other things, whether they are indirect, like a fee,” or potentially through requirements in areas such as receiver quality or narrowband usage, she said: “We need to look at it to make sure that spectrum is used effectively.”

The question of fees to help promote more efficient spectrum use among govt. users “is under active consideration as to whether it’s a good idea and if it would work,” she told us. One big question is “can you maintain the incentive a fee would create or would the budget or the OMB process remove it,” she said. One potential scenario is that the budget process could minimize the incentive of savings that users would see from relinquishing underutilized spectrum because that money would be shifted elsewhere in the budgetary process rather than going directly to that agency. The idea of govt. fees came up in an NTIA spectrum summit last year at which British officials described a spectrum user fee system there designed to decrease congestion and give both public and private users an incentive for turning back underused frequencies.

On the private side, the Administration is preparing to propose a bill that would follow up on a provision in the President’s budget blueprint, Victory said. The budget would give the FCC the authority to set user fees on unauctioned spectrum licenses based on public interest and spectrum management needs. Fee collections, which the budget estimated as beginning in 2005, would total $1.9 billion in the first 10 years. Although there were some initial concerns that unauctioned spectrum could include bands such as Wi-Fi, the legislative proposal appears to be focused on licensed bands. Victory stressed that the legislation would give the FCC the authority to impose such user fees, but wouldn’t require the agency to do so.

The Administration also is working on a proposed bill that would extend the FCC’s auction authority beyond 2007, when it now is scheduled to expire by statute, Victory said. Saying that the array of spectrum reform issues in the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force effort, Steve Berry, CTIA senior vp-govt. affairs, said a future auction reauthorization measure could open the door to Congress’s looking at those areas more closely: “I can’t believe Congress won’t have something to say about all these other issues when they look at renewing the FCC’s auction authority.”

Asked whether there was a need for a national spectrum policy, Adelstein said the FCC’s Task Force had been soliciting feedback on a wide range of management and technology issues. “It’s one of those processes that starts out and gets deeper and deeper,” he said. “There are certain principles we need to adhere to. One is regulatory certainty. It’s not clear that there is a need for a set national policy,” he said.

In response to a question on whether a national spectrum policy is needed, Abernathy said the Task Force plan would put in place the pieces for looking at how changes should be made. “We know that not everyone is going to get everything they want,” she said: “I'm not a big fan of major overhauls just for the sake of an overhaul.” The issues in the Task Force report are “headed in the right direction,” she said, but “I'm not sure a massive overhaul is really needed at this point.”

The Task Force report was among the pending regulatory topics mentioned most frequently during the show by both panelists and participants, including the concept of “interference temperature” that would set parameters for operators in a particular band to meet in order to gain more flexibility. “Clearly, interference temperature is one of the more complex issues presented in the report,” said Bruce Franca, deputy chief of the FCC Office of Engineering & Technology. A planned inquiry will ask many “practical questions about how you implement this,” he said: “There’s a lot of practical details that need to be worked out in this concept, so we're asking lots of questions.” An inquiry could be out as soon as late summer, Franca said.

Several FCC officials said the task force report had attracted interest from telecom regulators outside the U.S. Chmn. Powell said earlier in the week that in a recent conversation with a regulator from Jordan, he didn’t have to fill her in on the report because she already had read it. The FCC recently held a videoconference with telecom regulators in other countries in which Task Force Dir. Peter Tenhula discussed its findings, International Bureau Chief Donald Abelson. He said the Commission had held discussions about the report with its counterparts in Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K., with more planned with the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Russia. “I'm not sure this is a WRC ‘03 subject,” he said, referring to the World Radio Conference that starts in June in Geneva: “But it certainly might be a WRC ‘07 and beyond subject.” It’s likely to be talked about at this WRC but won’t be on the agenda, he said. In areas such as the secondary markets ideas in the Task Force report, there appear to be similarities with where European regulators are heading, he said. An idea that has drawn questions is noise temperature and “how you actually would measure it,” Abelson said.