FBI Says ATG Order Raises Major CALEA Concerns
The FBI and DEA met with the FCC last week to ask the Commission to take into account CALEA concerns as it wraps up an air-to-ground (ATG) rule for communications made on commercial airliners, including broadband. Meanwhile, an ATG order is on circulation on the 8th floor and could be finalized before the Commission’s Dec. 15 agenda meeting, we learned. Chmn. Powell could schedule a vote at the meeting if Commissioners otherwise don’t finish voting on the order.
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Sources said the Commission is awaiting additional technical information about interference concerns from Nextel and the Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials. The Nextel filing, sources said, will provide FCC with additional supporting engineering analysis of interference issues tied to ATG. CTIA and Motorola also have raised interference concerns. Powell circulated an ATG order that was pulled from the Nov. agenda meeting.
The FBI and DEA made a filing following a meeting with key FCC staff. “The FBI expressed its interest in ensuring that primacy of the pending CALEA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking be preserved in the context of the [ATG order],” the agencies said. “That is, that no action be taken in the [ATG order] that would prejudice, conflict or occlude the scope of any final rule to be issued in the pending CALEA NPRM.” The FBI also expressed concerns that unrestricted use of wireless phones on airlines presents issues that “were unaddressed by CALEA” and that were “under review by the FBI and other agencies in conjunction with industry.”
The Assn. of American Railroads (AAR) also made a filing raising concerns about interference with 6 channel pairs in the 900 MHz band used by railroads to control train movement and route alignment. AAR said the FCC has long deemed these channels critical: “The preservation of this innovative railroad communication system integrity has been deemed so vital by this Commission, that in 2001 it granted the AAR’s request to convert hundreds of individual station licenses operating on these 900 MHz channels at rail locations throughout the United States, into a single nationwide geographic ‘ribbon’ license.”
Sources said that the order that’s circulating supports a single carrier channel, proposed by Verizon’s AirFone, in opposition to the band-sharing scheme supported by AirCell and Boeing. The 3 companies continued to duke it out at the FCC in recent days.
AirFone charged in a filing that the revised AirCell- Boeing proposal “is not ‘new’ at all.” The carrier introduced a study by Telcordia looking at technical issues. AirFone told the FCC: “It continues to rely on cross-polarization to accommodate multiple ATG systems in the same spectrum and suffers from many of the same flaws as AirCell’s earlier proposal. It would result in significant interference to ATG systems, and not just from aircraft flying at low altitudes but also from aircraft flying at cruise altitudes.”
AirCell said in a filing it recently met with Nextel to discuss concerns about interference to other nearby spectrum incumbents. The preliminary conclusion was that interference levels would be with ranges set in other orders, such as the 800 MHz rebanding order, AirCell said. “Verizon/Telcordia have produced no contrary evidence -- only speculation,” AirCell said.