Some States Making Good Progress on 800 MHz Rebanding
The 800 MHz rebanding is taking longer than expected in some states, but a few are meeting their goals. The 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA), created by the FCC to oversee rebanding, names Utah and Colorado as states where rebanding is progressing smoothly. TA Director Brett Hahn told us those states’ success shows that, given pressure and coordination, rebanding can occur quickly.
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Hahn said Colorado has a frequency relocation agreement (FRA) with Sprint Nextel. “The state organization is very aggressive, very proactive, determined to try to meet as much as possible the commission’s deadline,” he said. “Right now as a result of their FRA and follow-up meetings we have a very good sense of where Colorado is… They are well past the halfway mark.”
Utah is in the final stages of FRA negotiations. “While they're doing that in order to keep everything moving the state is putting agreements through early subscriber deployment,” Hahn said. “We're turning those around as quickly as possible. For example, we received one on a Friday and we got it back to them on a Monday morning… coordination really helps make the process go faster. They let us know what they think they're going to be sending us. We were prepared for it. We were ready to respond effectively.”
Colorado and Utah have an advantage in that most state licensees come under a single state coordinating body. “They have a more coherent view,” Hahn said. “That said, they're very large systems and also they have very specific challenges -- hunting season, the mountains, the weather.” Energetic licensees make a difference, Hahn said. “If you're actively involved the vendors are there, the TA is there,” he said. “We want to do it quickly and we want to do it right.”
“We've made a concerted effort to get this going,” said Steve Proctor, executive director of the Utah Communications Agency Network. “We realized that this is going to happen. It’s going to take place and therefore we need to get ourselves prepared to make it happen successfully on our system.”
Progress has been difficult, Proctor said. “The biggest challenge has been, first of all, making Sprint Nextel understand the complexity of a public safety system,” he said. Another issue has been assembling an accurate record of which elements need rebanding and retuning, he said. “The third piece has been sitting down with [Sprint] in the negotiations process. They have a preconceived notion of what they need to do and we as public safety providers have a preconceived notion of what it is we need to receive to get the job done.”
Proctor conceded that Utah, with one major system and a few smaller systems that already are interconnected, had an easier time than many states. “Just because we have one or two major systems doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of work involved,” he said. “I don’t think going into this we realized the magnitude of what we were talking about.”