Public Safety Mulls Spectrum Shift, VoIP Petition

Telecom Policy Report, March 20, 2006

It's been calling for more federal leadership, additional professional funding, radio communications/systems interoperability, enhanced 911 capabilities for next-generation networks/services and a host of other future initiatives.

Now, the Federal Communications Commission has given the American public- safety, law-enforcement and emergency-user community some new spectrum and disaster-response matters to think about.

At its monthly open meeting last Friday, the federal regulator proposed looking at whether it could earmark a portion of the 700 MHz band allocated to public-safety usage after the broadcast digital television (DTV) transition for broadband. It also seeks comment on the establishment of a new Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau at the agency.

In its Eighth Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on public-safety and related spectrum issues, the FCC wants to know whether certain segments of 24 megahertz in the 700 MHz band "should be modified to accommodate broadband communications" and this may cause a stir. The commission wants comment on three specific proposals to modify the 700 MHz band plan submitted by the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, Motorola and Lucent Technologies. In a nutshell, all three plans propose combining general use, interoperability and reserve wideband RF segments in order to facilitate broadband communications.

The FCC's 1998 plan called for the 700 MHz public-safety spectrum (764 MHz-776 MHz and 794 MHz-806 MHz) to be divided in half between narrowband channels for voice and low-speed data services and wideband channels for high- speed data and slow-scan video services. Within the 12 megahertz of paired wideband spectrum, 4.8 megahertz is designated for general use, 1.8 megahertz was earmarked for interoperability and the remaining 5.4 megahertz is held in reserve for future public-safety needs. According to the FCC, general-use spectrum licenses are subject to a regional planning process similar to that used in the 800 MHz public-safety band. Under current rules, individual channels within general-use and interoperability wideband segments have a 50 kHz bandwidth, and licensees can aggregate three 50 kHz channels, giving them 150 kHz.

Groups Mull NPRM, Back New Bureau

The move, in part, dates back to a December 2005 report to Congress (under the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004) on public-safety spectrum needs in which the FCC had suggested examining the 700 MHz public safety/broadband communications option. Due to the new broadband-communications proposals, the FCC now wants new input from a previous proceeding in which the public-safety community suggested adoption of a scalable adaptive modulation (SAM) data interoperability standard as a requirement for all wideband radios. The FCC says the new proposals support the creation of guard bands to protect narrowband voice operations, and it has reached a tentative conclusion not to alter the narrowband portions of the 700 MHz public-safety band.

The full NPRM has not been released and, as of press time, such key groups as the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International had not commented on the new broadband proposals.

NENA and APCO, however, have said they welcome a new Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau that FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin advocated late last year in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's impact on residential, commercial and public-safety communications in the Gulf Coast. If approved, the new bureau will be organized into three divisions: Policy, Public Communications Outreach & Operations and Communications Systems Analysis. Aimed at addressing national security, emergency preparedness, disaster management, organizational structure and first-responder issues, the new bureau would require congressional approval and a staffing agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union.

According to the FCC, this new proposed layer in the agency's bureaucratic cake would consolidate functions that have been dispersed among seven different bureaus and offices: E911 matters, public safety answering points (PSAPs), the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), the priority TSP/WSP emergency communications programs, and the EAS alert and warning system.

Alternatives Needed Before Next Hurricane Season

In the other public-safety development at the commission, VoIP entrepreneurs Jeff Pulver of pulver.com and Tom Evslin of Evslin Consulting (co- founder of early VoIP wholesaler ITXC that was purchased by Canada's Teleglobe) are pushing for new rules for enhanced 911 calling that establish alternate communications services for affected customers.

Earlier in the week, the FCC received a petition from the two asking it to consider new rules for handling public-safety and end-user communications in disaster situations. Their proposal includes emergency voice-mail service activations, faster number porting to alternative carriers and formal "outage" parameters that would automatically jumpstart the new procedures.