NTIA DIR. EXPECTS GLOBAL UWB AGREEMENT, THOUGH NOT EASILY

“We have a precedent out there, several of them out there, of reaching consensus,” Gallagher told us. “If you look at commercial mobile wireless services there was an answer found. If you look back further in time you have radars. The very earliest applications, radar requires international frequencies so that when I fly an airplane from one country to another I have the same frequencies to be tracked and to be able to communicate.”

Gallagher said he wouldn’t have flown to Boston to meet with delegates unless he thought they were headed toward an agreement. “We have a history in spectrum policy of coming together as a world to authorize things,” he said. “There are bumps along the way. There are points of disagreement, but for the most part you do see a sincere approach, engineering based, to find a harmony.” Gallagher conceded that the ITU process can prove challenging: “I think the ITU is far from perfect, but it also has a demonstrated track record of success, especially in this area, in the area of spectrum policy. Authorizing technologies is perhaps the crown jewel of the ITU. It’s not perfect, but it certainly works.”

One U.S. negotiator said so far talks have gone “very well.” But a European source who has attended each of the meetings leading up to the Boston session said the difficult dynamic is that the various sides are growing more entrenched. “It seems like we're just going in circles,” the source said: “With the major players, everybody knows where everyone else stands and no one wants to move very much.” A U.S. source said ultimately no decisions will be made in Boston.

“There is a concern about whether the U.S. took into account all possible interference scenarios,” one U.S. source said. “It’s like vehicular radar. It’s going to happen because the technology saves lives…. But spectrum managers are concerned because they need to make themselves comfortable that it’s not going to interfere.”

The task group was to have its 2nd plenary meeting Mon. afternoon, the first since the opening session last week. Sources said many are already focusing on the 4th, and possibly penultimate, meting of the group in Nov. in Geneva. The committee addressing compatibility, the most difficult set of issues, is planning to hold a special meeting leading up to the Nov. session.

Martin Rofhart, co-founder of Freescale Semiconductor, now a Motorola subsidiary, said the most important thing the task force can do is come to similar conclusions to the findings of the FCC’s 2002 First Report & Order on UWB. “They struck a balance and this is all about striking a balance,” Rofhart said: “If you want to do something big like change spectrum policy you need to do it gradually.” He said that while an agreement may not be struck immediately “over time it will, because the work [by the FCC and NTIA] was actually done quite correctly.”

Motorola’s exhibit featured the company’s UWB chipsets. Rofhart encouraged the world delegates, almost all of them engineers, to turn on their cellphones next to the installations and determine for themselves whether they detected interference. While a primitive test, Rofhart said the demonstration was intended to start a dialog. He noted that while resistance has come from nations with less of a spectrum crunch than the U.S., Motorola’s message is that spectrum is a scare resource worldwide.

“Everyone is going to run out of available spectrum in some way, shape, form, manner,” he argued. “How do you get market efficiencies moving spectrum around? Get more use out of the spectrum? Your only path is technology solutions and UWB is one of them. I think it’s inevitable. I think that companies like Motorola and its peers are playing a long game as they should and they're working with governments. They're working in bodies like the IEEE to get it done.”

Rofhart said he hoped to speak with delegates from some of the nations, particularly th U.K. and France, that have expressed the most concerns about potential interference from UWB devices. “It’s a gradual, gentle process,” he said: “There are questions that legitimately need to be asked and answered. The aggregation effects. We know the answer is positive. We understand the analysis. We understand what happens in practice. We understand the measurements as well. But other people have to test as well. They have to do it to their satisfaction.”

Pulselink, which plans to start selling UWB chips next year, set up an elaborate exhibit to show its technology at work. “We want to put the technology in front of people so that they can see some of the ways this can be used,” Pres. Bruce Watkins said. He said his biggest complaint about the conference is that it was held deep inside a hotel where GPS receivers won’t work. “If it did work in the room, while I'm radiating those HDTV signals I would hold that GPS receiver physically touching the antennas,” he said. “You're not going to see anything.”

The goal of Pulselink is also worldwide adoption of a standard similar to that put forward by the FCC, Watkins said. “We want to see regulatory adoption that looks exactly like what the FCC has,” he said. “If we get nothing but the First Report & Order and the rest of the world will look like that, beautiful…. What we're trying to do is grab folks and say we can do this. It works. It’s an education process and we're going to do it.”