SIA, Motorola Press FCC To Wait For UWB Testing Results Before Granting Waivers
Satellite Industry Assn. (SIA) and Motorola said it’s important for the FCC to wait until the NTIA’s Institute for Telecom Services (ITS) completes its testing program to evaluate the risk of interference from UWB before granting any waivers of UWB rules. Their comments came as the FCC prepares to act on the waiver petition by the Multiband OFDM Alliance Special Interest Group (MBOA-SIG) at its meeting Thurs.
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“Those tests, and the valuable information that would result, are not yet complete,” Motorola said in an ex parte filing last week, referring to the NTIA study. “Without such information, there is no basis for the Commission to deviate from its previously stated position that no change to the UWB rules is warranted,” it said. SIA stressed the importance of waiting for the ITS study results before granting any “waivers that could potentially eat into the margin for interference that satellite operators have set aside to cope with interference from co-frequency sources.”
NTIA has released the first part of its 3-part report (CD March 3 p8) describing the methodology, test system and procedures developed to characterize UWB emissions and measure susceptibility of C-band satellite digital TV receivers. It said the other 2 reports would assess the interference potential for gated Gaussian noise bursts and modern UWB systems. One FCC official has said that while the Commission would “naturally” look at whether there were any adjustments to UWB as it moved forward, it was “premature to say” how the NTIA study would affect the FCC examination of UWB rules. The officials has said there’s already “considerable amount of information in the record on which to base the decision.”
The MBOA-SIG petition filed in Aug. asked the Commission to waive Part 15 of the Commission’s rules regarding UWB systems that employ multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplex (MB-OFDM) modulation techniques. MBOA-SIG asked that the average emission levels from UWB MB-OFDM transmitters -- sequenced between 3 frequency bands “according to one of 4 deterministic and fixed hopping patterns” -- be measured under normal operating conditions instead of with the band sequencing stopped. The NTIA’s ITS testing program is aimed at evaluating the risk of interference from UWB, including the type of system proposed by the MBOA-SIG.
MBOA-SIG representatives from Texas Instruments, Intel and Staccato Communications emphasized during their ex parte meeting with FCC officials that “real world tests have demonstrated that MB-OFDM causes no more interference to licensed services than other UWB platforms already approved by the FCC.” They said the FCC should let the market decide the best UWB technology.
The agency is expected to grant the waiver request this Thurs., according to FCC sources. “There hasn’t been a lot of discussion” of the UWB item on the 8th floor, one source said: “Nobody raised any concerns” about granting the petition. Another agency source said the waiver decision would apply not only to MBOA-SIG but to any similarly situated parties. “We are going to do that in a context of the waiver, but the waiver isn’t necessarily restricted only to the filing party and everybody who is similarly situated could take advantage of it as well,” the source said. He said the agency was “still figuring out how to write a rule provision on the measurement techniques. We are going to look overall at our measurement issues presented by UWB technology, but in the interim, we are looking at the type of technology presented by MBOA-SIG.”