FCC Staff Pushing Carriers To Support Plan To Locate TV Stations in 600 MHz Duplex Gap
FCC staffers are leaning on wireless carriers to endorse their proposal to put TV stations in the “duplex gap” between uplink and downlink frequencies bought by carriers, industry and FCC officials said. Broadcasters, consumer and public interest groups, and high-tech companies have lined up against the plan, which they characterize as a change from the auction rules approved by the FCC last year (see 1507070055). Pressure has been intense, but carriers for the most part have taken more of a middle-of-the-road stance, the officials said, saying the issue has emerged as the biggest hot-button issue going into a vote on the TV incentive auction rules next week (see 1506250057).
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“It ought to be a red flag for the commissioners and the chairman that the only way staff can get even lukewarm support out of some of the carriers is through major arm-twisting,” Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, told us. “If every single industry stakeholder is saying, ‘This is a terrible idea, please don't do this,' we would much rather have a broadcaster in the uplink than in the duplex gap,’ that ought to be a giant red flag.”
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is unlikely to get Republican support for the auction proposals so he would need buy-in from Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel to win on the duplex gap issue, FCC officials said Thursday.
Wireless carrier sources told us the question is complicated, and they want to maximize the amount of spectrum available for auction but interference questions remain. AT&T has been the only national carrier that has supported the staff’s revised plan for the duplex gap, industry officials said. But the Competitive Carriers Association filed a letter at the FCC late Thursday endorsing the change. The FCC’s own examination has found keeping stations out of the gap “will significantly reduce spectrum clearing targets and significantly increase broadband impairments,” CCA said. “Smaller spectrum-clearing targets comprised of more impaired spectrum also have the potential to slash billions of dollars from the funds available to pay broadcasters to clear the band and could close the door on broadcasters who had hoped to exit their businesses with a sizeable financial gain.”
The FCC’s June 2, 2014, auction order allowed for market variation in the 600 MHz band to maximize the amount of spectrum that will be sold in the auction.
“Our consumer coalition told the commissioners this week that given mobile market trends, better Wi-Fi is far more valuable to consumers and to competition than is marginally less impairment to the auctioned spectrum, or even a somewhat bigger incentive auction,” said Michael Calabrese, director of New America’s Wireless Future Project. Nothing in the record would support reversing last year’s decision to set aside the duplex gap for unlicensed use in every market nationwide, he said.
Both CTIA and Verizon in the past went on the record as strongly opposing the placement of TV channels in the gap, Calabrese said. “CTIA and Qualcomm filed engineering studies they said demonstrate that unlicensed devices operating at less than four percent the power level of a TV station would greatly impair LTE in adjacent downlink channels. Since downlink spectrum is so much more valuable and can be paired asymmetrically with uplink in markets where that is necessary, using the duplex gap and impairing LTE downlink makes no sense.”
Feld said FCC staff are basing their finding that broadcasters can be placed in the gap on a recent commission impairment analysis. “The critical problem, and the reason carriers are so uniformly resistant to this proposal, is that impairment to the downlink, which is what happens when you put a broadcaster in the duplex gap, is much worse for carriers economically than impairment in the uplink,” he said. Traffic is asymmetrical, with most people downloading far more data than they upload, he said.
CTIA weighed in on the duplex gap as part of a letter Thursday to the FCC proposing changes to the auction rules (see 1507090032). “We support unlicensed operations in the 600 MHz band duplex gap and guard bands as long as they create no interference challenges," the group said. “Consistent with the real-world testing submitted by V-COMM, the Commission should adopt technical rules that both provide sufficient buffers and appropriate limits on harmful emissions from unlicensed operations into 600 MHz wireless licensed services.” The V-Comm report warned of interference problems if unlicensed devices were allowed to use the 600 MHz guard band or duplex gap (see 1503020024).
New America, Public Knowledge, Free Press and Common Cause also made their case in filings at the FCC, including on a meeting with Rosenworcel. A filing said the groups told the commissioner of widespread concern about TV stations in the gap, especially in major markets like Baltimore, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “Exclusion of unlicensed devices in the Duplex Gap in these markets would deprive millions of Americans of the full benefits of unlicensed low-band spectrum availability in such ‘TV white spaces,’ including ‘next generation WiFi,’ by undermining the benefits identified in the 2014 Framework Order from providing a minimum of three channels for unlicensed sharing in every market,” they said. The filing was posted Thursday in docket 12-268.