Qualcomm, SIA, But Few Others Making Their Case on Broadband in Flight NPRM
FCC officials say they're seeing little lobbying on an rulemaking notice set for a vote at the May 9 commission meeting on improving access to broadband on commercial flights. The NPRM would establish an Air-Ground Mobile Broadband service as a secondary-use in the 14.0-14.5 GHz Band. With the NPRM set to go on the Sunshine Agenda late Thursday, cutting off further debate, there have been only two ex parte filings in the last 30 days in the main docket, RM-11640. Qualcomm had meetings at the FCC late last week, but has yet to make ex parte filings, agency officials said. The Satellite Industry Association has set up meetings with some of the offices for later this week.
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FCC officials said SIA has some long-standing concerns because the spectrum is set aside as a satellite uplink band, but there has been little other interest in the NPRM, at least based on meeting requests. The May 9 FCC meeting is expected to be Julius Genachowski’s last as chairman. One agency official said the NPRM seemed to be a priority of the chairman since he’s an avid traveler and consumer of inflight broadband services.
The NPRM follows a July 2011 petition for rulemaking filed by Qualcomm. Qualcomm is seeking a new secondary status footnote in the U.S. Table of Allocations for a commercial, bi-directional air-ground mobile service and rules under which the service would operate (http://bit.ly/Y9hyK6).
SIA and Row 44, which provides inflight broadband to airline passengers and crew using satellite spectrum, objected to the Qualcomm petition when the FCC sought comment last year (CD Aug 2/12 p5). Too many questions remain about the effect on the fixed satellite service, SIA said (http://bit.ly/ZY2JaL). “It is important to reiterate that Qualcomm’s detailed technical analysis is based on very conservative operational assumptions, which ensure that all incumbent users will be protected by a substantial margin,” Qualcomm replied (http://bit.ly/ZMi1E8).
The only eighth floor meetings reported in recent days were by representatives of the Utilities Telecom Council and startup company Winchester Cator. They have a second petition before the agency, filed in May 2008, asking that the spectrum be set aside on a secondary basis for utilities to use for fixed point-to-point and point-to-multipoint services. Since both petitions relate to the 14 GHz band they “urged the Commission to include the UTC/Winchester Cator petition’s proposed use of this spectrum band for smart grid and other critical infrastructure industry uses and for wireless backhaul among the proposed uses of the 14.0-14.5 GHz band discussed in the upcoming NPRM,” according to an ex parte filing posted Monday by the commission (http://bit.ly/15V6JjF).