800 MHz Rebanding Progress Slow But Gaining Steam
BALTIMORE -- Public safety licensees, working with Sprint Nextel, the FCC and the Transition Administrator have made steady progress on 800 MHz rebanding the past year, officials said Thursday, the last day of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials annual meeting. Though many licensees likely won’t complete rebanding by the FCC’s June 2008 deadline, the mood at the conference was markedly brighter than at the 2006 APCO meeting, when crisis seemed near.
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Alan Tilles, an attorney who has represented dozens of licensees in their negotiations with Sprint, sees many signs of progress in recent months: “It will never be done by mid-next year. A lot of individual systems will be done… but we have some very large systems that just physically can’t be done. There certainly are a series of deals that are moving forward that we about to sign agreements on. Then there is a group that has issues… Every time you solve one of those big picture issues it helps a whole bunch behind it go.”
Tilles told us that in one of the most prominent fights, Sprint and Tazewell County, Ill., have reached an agreement (CD June 4 p3). Sprint had requested a hearing before an administrative law judge as it contested an FCC order it pay an extra $500,000 in rebanding costs to replace 262 mobile radios. The agreement is before the Transition Administrator for approval.
Robert Gurss, APCO’s director of legal and government affairs, credited a May 17 FCC order -- clarifying the standard for fixing rebanding costs Sprint Nextel -- must pay with helping move the process along the last three months. “We're coming off a period in which there was a great deal of contention and concern,” Gurss said. “The commission’s minimum cost order has created an opportunity to change things. Things are changing. They're improving in some ways. But there is still a lot of anxiety about scheduling.”
David Buchanan, representing the TA, encouraged licensees to keep plugging away even if issues remain to be resolved. “We're making some steady progress,” he said. “Everyone is working at and obviously you all need to keep working at it, but it’s coming along. Buchanan advised APCO members: “If you're an agency that needs to get started, you should let Nextel know that. I do know they work with you and they try to help you where they can. We certainly don’t want anybody to stop if there’s any way to make progress.”
Danielle Marcella of M/A-Com the major maker of first responder radios besides Motorola -- said she was surprised about how hard rebanding has proven: “We didn’t think it would be this contentious. We didn’t think it would take this long. It’s a lot more complicated than we thought.” If licensees approach rebanding properly they can make progress, she said: “You have to be detailed and you have to be reasonable… There’s a lot of misconceptions about what is reasonable and what is not… Have justifications for what you're asking for and be willing to stand up for what you believe in and this will go smoother than it has in the past.”
Bill Jenkins, a leader of the Sprint Nextel reconfiguration team, defended the carrier, which worked out the landmark 2004 agreement with public safety allowing the rebanding. Jenkins said the carrier initially thought that public safety agencies would “drop everything” to concentrate on completing the process, to resolve years of complaints about interference to first responder radios from calls made by Nextel subscribers. “That’s not going to happen and you can’t do that,” Jenkins said. “We've come to realize that you have jobs that are much more important in protecting your communities than rebanding.”
Jenkins said licensees are also to blame for conflicts, because many agencies haven’t presented firm cost quotes until they're already locked in with Sprint. “Because this is so extremely complex a lot of people are falling into that situation. We had never expected to be mediating those negotiations before we even had time to discuss the cost quotes you have given us.” As a result, Sprint has wrongly been accused of “nickel and diming” licensees, he said.
“We're going over a cost quote and we'll ask: ‘You say you need 20 cables here,'” Jenkins said. “'We only have 10 repeaters that you're replacing. Might this need be 10?’ Then all of a sudden you've got people who were on the call, you've got attorneys, you've got mediators. They say Nextel was arguing about this in mediation. We weren’t arguing about it in mediation. We were going through and asking questions that normally would have been answered during the mandatory negotiations and the voluntary negotiations.”