Two Years After FCC Approval, Medical Body Area Networks Haven't Been Deployed

The MBAN order took years to develop (see 1205250045). The FCC sought comment on an MBAN proposal by GE Healthcare in April 2008. GEHC filed its petition in 2006 in reaction to a notice of inquiry seeking broad comment on future spectrum needs for wireless medical technologies. MBAN systems will let doctors monitor and log data from patients with chronic diseases, without the need for wires connected to sensors, FCC officials said when the order was approved.

Other similar decisions take as long or longer to complete. TV white spaces devices are not yet widely deployed, even though the FCC started work on the issue in 2004, industry officials say. The use of the TV band for Wi-Fi and other unlicensed use has been complicated by the proposed TV incentive auction, which will be followed by a reshuffling of TV channels, some observers say. The 800 MHz rebanding got started in 2004 and 10 years later is still a work in progress.

Charlie Giordano, chief technology officer at GEHC, said in an interview that a lot has been happening behind the scenes since the FCC handed down the MBAN order. Work continues on various technical challenges, including power management, he said. “The industry is starting to react,” he said. “We’re grateful for the ruling and it takes some time for the product development to occur.” His company wants to make sure its product is “of high quality, robust” before rollout, he said. Giordano said he couldn't say when MBAN systems are likely to be deployed in hospitals.

"Repurposing and deploying spectrum can be like untangling a rat's nest of complex issues -- which almost always boil down to avoiding harmful interference among licensees,” said former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, now at Wiley Rein. “As I said years ago while on the commission, the glacial pace by the government in the effort to help victims of paralysis through emerging MBAN technologies is simply heartbreaking.” There are plenty of examples where change has taken a long time and a few success stories, like the 700 MHz auction, McDowell said. “Most spectrum initiatives usually take the better part of a decade to resolve,” he said. All involved in MBAN initiatives should “redouble their efforts to resolve all remaining issues considering the highly sympathetic nature of the people who could benefit from the government moving forward,” he said.

NAB Executive Vice President Rick Kaplan said government and industry are both sometimes responsible for delays. “On the FCC side, there has to be the will and the bandwidth to get things done,” said Kaplan, former chief of the FCC Wireless Bureau. “Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. On the stakeholder side, it often comes down to incentives -- namely, whether all parties benefit from the redeployment. If not, you can run into feet-dragging.” Kaplan said the incentive auction can’t be blamed for lack of commercial activity in the TV white spaces. “The lack of devices is due to a lack of demand and interest,” he said. “There has been ample time to ramp up, and instead we have nothing to show for all of that work.”

Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future, said the government should develop a long-term spectrum strategy, coupled with incentives for federal agencies to give up frequencies. “The reality is that spectrum redeployment is a long and tedious process that does not keep pace with evolving technology and consumer demand – no matter how critical the new use,” Spalter said. Whether it's MBAN or another band, “repurposing requires both more urgency and speed.” Six years, the time period since the last major auction, “has been a wireless lifetime to wait” for more spectrum, he said.

Doug Brake, telecom policy analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation​, also urged spectrum reform, with general decentralization of the repurposing process. The FCC “does the great bulk of its work through the rulemaking process, which is rarely quick,” he noted. A first step would be clearer “definition of rights and expectations that can be negotiated over between different types of users with different architectures and business models,” he said.

The faster a band is transitioned, the higher the cost, said Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner. “The problem is that you either have to take all the old transmission-capable items out of commission or the new technology needs to be resistant to the interference of the old equipment,” Entner said. “The more significant the impact such interference can have the more careful one has to be. When it comes to anything medical you want to be extra careful.”

The fix is not a mystery, said Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation. "The answer is that the FCC needs to move away from a cumbersome administrative command-and-control process to a much more market-based one that is flexible enough to accommodate user demands,” he said.

Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld said redeploying or refarming spectrum is always hard. Feld, a member of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, cited the length of time it has taken carriers to refarm their 2G spectrum and for Sprint to repurpose the old Nextel network. “Those cases are, in theory, much simpler because all the spectrum is under control of the licensee, and the licensee has enormous incentive to repurpose the spectrum -- and still takes years,” Feld said. New uses of spectrum “must take into account pre-existing users with equal or superior rights,” he said. “To make the challenge more difficult, existing users want rules that are ultra-conservative, for fear that post-hoc enforcement will be ineffective. But rules that are too restrictive make it much too expensive to build and develop equipment, particularly for new services with no existing market.”

The FCC retains too much power in deciding how spectrum is deployed, said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom. “Before the Federal Radio Commission was created, federal courts started developing a common law of spectrum based on tort and property principles,” he said. “Ideally, we'd return to that system. Until we do, we can only tinker at the edges to make the FCC slightly faster at reallocating spectrum.”