FCC TAC to Recommend Voluntary Receiver Standards

Receiver standards have long been a hot button issue, with the House Communications Subcommittee exploring broader issues in a hearing last month (CD Nov 30 p1). The work TAC is doing was mentioned repeatedly during the hearing. “We have a first,” Roberson joked. “There was House subcommittee review of our work before having presented it to this body.” Receiver standards covers a wide number of devices, from radios and TVs to police radios to Wi-Fi systems.

Roberson, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, proposed that TAC recommend voluntary receiver standards for specific devices to be incorporated into broader standards, to be overseen by a multistakeholder group. “This would be an opportunity, we believe for device manufacturers to present the information about their devices so that it is open, available,” he said. “It would be, therefore, very helpful to those designing devices for adjacent channels, for that matter, designing devices that would be occupying the same standard.” The group has shifted much of its focus to interference limits and establishing the cost of mitigation for harmful interference, Roberson said. “This is very important work, we believe,” he said. “Although it is hard work to implement, we have, at this point, received no input that this was not the right path to go.” The time has come to test voluntary standards to make sure they work, he said.

The group will also recommend “the initiation of requests for the information needed around the interference limits policy,” Roberson said. “It would more generally provide us with a basis for establishing the harmful interference limits that we need to move forward on this.” As a final next step, the working group will stress the importance of “establishing the technical foundation … making sure that we really have at the nitty-gritty level the detailed understanding of what is required in order to move forward on this proposal,” Roberson said.

TAC member Dale Hatfield, who has been assisting an FCC review of receiver standards, said enforcement is a key issue. “It really concerns me, because as we jam people in tighter and tighter, closer together, and with the increased importance of wireless and so forth, protecting the environment from excessive interference becomes critical and enforcement is just an awfully important part of that,” said Hatfield, former chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology. “I don’t think our ability to deal with that interference environment is what it should be. … Wave forms are a lot more complex, people are hopping around from channel to channel."

"Wireless is where the world’s going,” said TAC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “You have set out to identify all of the issues that are the trip points along the way and say, ‘Let’s deal with them ahead of time.'"

Addressing receiver standards is critical, Genachowski said, saying the U.S. has “regained the global lead” in wireless. “It’s really good news in so many ways,” he said. “It also means that we are the first country in the world that’s going to have to address the challenges that are coming from the new devices and the new demand.” Genachowski said the FCC appreciates the recommendations made by TAC on public switched telephone network transition and other issues. “We didn’t want this to be a debating society,” he said. “We wanted it to be a group … that was making practical suggestions to the commission and you've done that consistently."

TAC’s machine-to-machine working group recommended creating an M2M service registration database and an M2M center of excellence at the FCC and stressed the importance of streamlining the certification of M2M. A database would “enable interoperability … as well as service management” said Shahid Ahmed, a partner at Accenture, chairman of the working group. “What we heard from the marketplace and the overall ecosystem is that interoperability, roaming and service management are key gaps that the providers were forecasting or were experiencing today,” he said.

TAC’s wireless security working group, meanwhile, will recommend the FCC create a “cross industry” campaign to target consumers with information with the threats to wireless security and the “simple actions that consumers might take,” said Paul Steinberg, chief technology officer at Motorola Solutions, who presented a report from the group. “At every touch” industry needs to “educate the consumer audience because that’s the last line of defense,” he said. The group is also developing white papers on Wi-Fi security and mobile anti-malware, Steinberg said.

Wheeler said at the end of the meeting that TAC, which must be reauthorized each year by the FCC, still has lots of work ahead. “You have teed up the issues,” he said. “Those issues will be joined with issues raised by the commission, mixed together with some kind of holiday punch and brought forth as goals or issues to be wrestled by a subsequent TAC.”