Genachowski Asks TAC to Take Deep Dive on Band Planning

"Band planning is one of the fundamental activities of the FCC,” Genachowski said. “As we all know the world had changed very significantly since when the FCC first started doing spectrum band plans.” The FCC remains hopeful that the still to be scheduled incentive auction will see broadcasters willing to sell a significant amount of their spectrum for wireless broadband, he said. “One of the things the commission will have to do is do a bandplan for 600 MHz,” Genachowski said. “This is a big deal. ... The world is very interested in what we decide to do for 600 MHz because they continue to recognize that the U.S. has been a leader in spectrum policy, but also because they recognize the benefits of scale economics from their perspective as well.”

Genachowski credited some of the work done by TAC so far with helping the U.S. catch up and move ahead of the rest of the world. “It wasn’t that long ago if you traveled to South Korea or Japan you'd say, ‘Wow, they're doing all these incredibly cool stuff on their mobile devices. That’s not happening in the U.S. Why are we behind?'” Genachowski said. “It’s a different world now. ... Japan and South Korea now, the mobile platform that they're using is American. It’s IOS. It’s Android. It’s Windows."

U.S. broadband infrastructure also is emerging as a leader, Genachowski said. “The U.S. is going to be the first country in the world to scale at 4G and the rest of the world knows it,” he said. “When I go and spend time with my counterparts in other countries and meet with people from the private sector in other countries more and more the question I'm getting is, ‘How is the U.S. doing this?'"

TAC’s Receivers and Spectrum Work Group is focused right now on identifying things that can be done immediately to move toward “actionable recommendations to the TAC on the effective approach for receiver standards, interference limits and their interaction and integration, said former Motorola Chief Technology Officer Dennis Roberson, who chairs the group. Incentives will be part of the equation, “but there is going to be a role for enforcement in this,” he said. “To make it work you have to have enforcement. Hopefully we can have incentives that will limit enforcement.”

One area the group is looking at closely is interference limits, Roberson said. “The interference limits idea has been around for a little while. It’s a really exciting idea in this context of moving rapidly ... looking at what we can do in the interference limits area by using cellular base stations as a stalking horse, an initial starting point is a key one.”

FCC official Michael Ha said the Multi-band Devices Work Group has identified a number of issues for further discussions. “Within the next two or three years there are some immediate spectrum allocations like AWS4 that will be coming to the market,” Ha said. “We want to be aware of technical availabilities so that we don’t overshoot or undershoot in terms of our requirements and we understand what are the possibilities that can happen.” The group is also looking at mid-term and long-term issues, Ha said.

TAC member Martin Cooper, often seen as a father of the cellphone, said much remains for the group. “The amount of technology that is stuffed into these cellphones that you've got in front of you right now is just incredible,” he said. “Your cellphone has got seven different antennas in it. It’s got seven different systems in it.” Cooper said his takeaway is “the FCC can be very aggressive in what they ask the industry to do because whatever you ask for I guarantee they're going to come up with it."

The PSTN Transition Issues Work Group wants to move away from the concept of “copper retirement,” said Russ Gyurek of Cisco, in a report from that group. “We really feel that the statement copper retirement is probably a misnomer,” he said. “We'd like to look at that as either copper replacement or transition.” Industry is already well under way to moving away from copper in many areas, Gyurek said. “At this point in time we didn’t see a need to sort of push that,” he said. “We felt that there’s a pretty good momentum already taking place.” A major determining factor is cost. “One of the things that came up to is what’s the cost to move services,” he said. “There’s not a single cost.” Gyurek said the group wants to move away from looking at copper retirement to focus on “interconnect moving forward and some of the issues around data-base transitions.”

Genachowski asked the various working groups to finalize recommendations in the various areas by the time TAC next meets in September. “I want to ask you as directly as I can to really focus on actionable recommendations,” he said. “There’s no waiting around on any of these issues.”