Verizon Wireless Urges Earlier DTV Auction
Congress should hasten by 9 months the auction of spectrum freed in the DTV transition, and direct winners’ down payments to public safety use, Verizon Gen. Counsel Steve Zipperstein told reporters Tues. Verizon wants the auction held the first quarter of 2007, he said, but “it will require legislation to do this.” A Senate bill tags April 7, 2009, for the hard DTV transition, setting Jan 28, 2008, for the auction. A House bill would set a Dec. 31, 2008, transition and fixes Jan. 7, 2008, for the auction.
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“Congress ought to adopt a special payment mechanism for the winning bidders,” Zipperstein said. After the auction, winners would have to make, for example, 20% down payments, earmarked by Congress for immediate public safety use or other Congressional priorities, under the Verizon proposal. That would “put funds in the hands of public safety, to enable them to start the process of planning to acquire hardware, software and other systems, and to be able to hit the ground running once the 24 MHz is made available to them at the transition date,” Zipperstein said. The method would “get the money in the hands of public safety without imposing new taxes, without engaging in borrowing, without burdening the public safety agencies themselves,” he said.
A speedier DTV auction won’t hurt spectrum value, given an expected mid-2006 auction of advanced wireless services spectrum, Zipperstein said. Holding the auction 9 months earlier “will strike the right balance between the need to bring in as much revenue as possible into the U.S. Treasury and at the same time make available spectrum to public safety as early as possible,” he said.
The move would help both the wireless industry and public safety, Zipperstein said. “Carriers will have an incentive to participate [in the auction] because they will have certainty sooner in time as to whether they will have access to the spectrum once it’s clear,” he said: “Obviously, Congress and FCC can take steps to ensure that the process functions smoothly and provides all the right incentives to all the right participants.”
The Verizon scheme would deliver an “enormous amount of money” to public safety -- and would do so 2 years earlier than other plans, Zipperstein said. A 20% down payment would mean $2-3 billion for public safety -- a sum “consistent” with estimates of the cost of achieving interoperability, he said. The Senate DTV bill provides for a $1 billion public safety interoperability grant, “but that wouldn’t occur until 2009,” Zipperstein said: “We would be giving public safety more money, assuming that the auction will raise the expected amount, and 2 years earlier than we otherwise would, because the deposit would be given to them in 2007, not in 2009 when the transition is complete.”
Verizon Wireless has discussed its proposal on the Hill and with the public safety community, Zipperstein said without revealing names. “We would call on other interested parties to support accelerating the DTV auction into the first quarter of 2007,” he said. “It will be up to conferees to decide” if they want to move the auction date as proposed, Zipperstein said: “There are a lot of complexities here, a lot of competing interests. Our focus is on trying to figure out the way to use public proceeds to benefit public safety.”