Adam Bender

The Senate was notified by “hotline” Tuesday afternoon that a bipartisan bill to provide each FCC commissioner’s office an electrical engineer or computer scientist (S-2881) was set for unanimous consent passage unless a senator objected. The hotline deadline had not been reached at our deadline. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and is similar to HR-4809 by Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif. The Congressional Budget Office in April said the Senate bill would cost $7 million from 2011 to 2015 (CD April 9 p6).

The FCC wouldn’t be able to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act, under draft net neutrality legislation circulating in the House. The proposed law, which if enacted would sunset at the end of 2012, would allow the FCC only to adjudicate violations case by case, and would treat wireless and wireline networks differently. Discussions were ongoing Monday afternoon, with the details “still in a great amount of flux,” said a House staffer.

The U.S. should find more commercial spectrum to promote mobile smart grid technologies, said wireless manufacturers at a Hill briefing Friday afternoon, hosted by the Telecommunications Industry Association. Spectrum is critical to new cellphone apps designed to help users conserve energy, said Jason Scism, a lobbyist for Research in Motion and former aide to Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “More spectrum and allowing that spectrum to be used by marketplace demand would go a long way” to spurring smart-grid growth, agreed Qualcomm Vice President Dean Brenner. “Cellular networks are very well situated” to provide the communications platform for the smart grid, he said. Requiring utilities to provide consumers with machine-readable data about their energy usage would also promote the development of new smart grid devices and applications, said TIA energy consultant Joseph Andersen. That was a recommendation in the National Broadband Plan. Government incentives for buying and developing smart grid technologies, and a coordinated awareness campaign by the White House, utilities, and federal and state governments are other ways to promote adoption of smart grid equipment, Andersen said. The Qualcomm and RIM officials cited several smart grid tools that use cellular technology. Qualcomm is working on putting cellular technology into electric vehicle charging stations to help drivers find a location to charge up, Brenner said. RIM has an app that adjusts home heating and air-conditioning based on the user’s proximity to their home, Scism said.

Members of the House continued to seek consensus Friday on a net neutrality deal (CD Sept 23 p10), but no one introduced a bill. Introduction is still possible next week, a House aide said, but time is running out for this Congress. The House is due to adjourn Oct. 8 but may leave a week early. A post-election session is possible. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday the House will be in session next week and not go home until it completes a continuing resolution on federal spending. “But the end of the fiscal year [is] September 30, and we've targeted all of our work to be finished by the end of the fiscal year,” she said.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., will hold as many hearings as it takes to pass his public safety bill, the Senate Commerce Committee chairman said at a hearing Thursday. He conceded Congress probably won’t pass legislation this year. His bill (S-3756) would give the 700 MHz D-block to public safety, and fund the network with money from incentive auctions of broadcaster spectrum. Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said she’s “prepared to support” the Rockefeller bill, but still has funding questions. Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett maintained that the government should commercially auction the D-block.

A Capitol Hill deal on net neutrality looks increasingly unlikely, Hill staffers said Wednesday. A Senate agreement probably won’t be made before Congress adjourns next month, a Senate staffer said. Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., of the Senate Communications Subcommittee said Tuesday (CD Sept 22 p1) he was working with ranking member John Ensign, D-Nev., on a “compromise concept.” Kerry and Ensign’s offices “are in constant communication but have not reached a consensus on the specifics of a compromise on network neutrality,” the staffer said. “With the clock running out on this session, it is unlikely that we will produce anything prior to adjournment. But the issue is not going away and the senators will continue listening to each other and working with each other as well as other colleagues on the committee to encourage outcomes that all participants in the market and consumers can understand, respect, and comply with.” Meanwhile, the House is still looking for consensus. The pieces aren’t in place to introduce a bill, a House staffer told us. A measure could still drop Thursday or even Friday, but it’s “now or never,” said the staffer.

The House hopes to pass a communications accessibility bill before adjourning next month, said a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The House and Senate are working to resolve differences between their bills, HR-3101 and S-3304, the Pelosi spokesman said. The House could pass a modified version of the Senate bill as early as this week, a telecom lobbyist said.

A Senate deal on net neutrality is being discussed by Senate Communications Subcommittee leaders, subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., told us Tuesday. But a Senate aide said the staffs of Kerry and Ranking Member John Ensign, R-Nev., failed to reach agreement in discussions over the August recess. The House Commerce Committee is still in talks over its own net neutrality bill, said Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Legislation for a public safety network probably won’t pass this year, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told us after a news conference Tuesday afternoon. McCain has a bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., that would give the 700 MHz D-block to public safety agencies. After they introduced it, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., introduced his own bill to do the same. Since Rockefeller is chairman of the Commerce Committee, “I think that’s a good thing, and I look forward to working with him,” McCain said. He said he hasn’t seen Rockefeller’s bill, but he hopes to read it.

Auctioning the D-block is “right technically, it’s right as public policy, [and] it’s even right politics,” said T-Mobile Vice President Tom Sugrue at a press conference Monday. But most major public safety groups oppose an auction and want Congress to give them the D-block spectrum. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has a bill to give public safety the D-block and scheduled a hearing for Thursday morning. “This is a long process and there’s always ups and downs,” but the 4G Coalition plans to keep fighting and convince policymakers to auction the spectrum, Sugrue said. While the Senate is moving to D-block reallocation, a bipartisan group of House members seemed to agree with the auction approach at a hearing earlier this year, Sugrue said. “This week’s hearing may go a little differently, but we'll see.” House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was working on a draft bill authorizing an auction, still seems interested but appears to be waiting to see “how the process plays out” before introducing the bill, Sugrue told us afterward. There may be some desire in Congress to do a comprehensive spectrum bill next year, and public safety could get wrapped into that, he added. A lack of funding has held back a national public safety network, said T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham. “It has nothing to do with spectrum.” Auctioning the D-block will bring “competition and choice” to public safety and consumers, she said. The FCC should move forward on its rulemaking to determine how the network will operate and what the licensing scheme will be, she said. On most days, public safety would have sufficient capacity for its network using its existing 10 MHz allocation of 700 MHz spectrum, and in emergencies they could share capacity on the LTE networks of major carriers, said Ken Zdunek, chief technology officer of Roberson and Associates, a consulting firm that prepared a recent technical white paper for T-Mobile. The LTE standard would make it easy for consumers and public safety to “peacefully coexist,” said the consulting firm’s president and former Motorola CTO Dennis Roberson. Leveraging commercial networks would offer great network resiliency because commercial towers are built closely together and because public safety could fall back on multiple networks, Zdunek said. T-Mobile, meanwhile, explained how it ran a scan of spectrum use by the government in eight cities whose results it filed with the commission (CD Aug 26 p6). The scan used spectrum analyzers on T-Mobile towers with clear lines of sight to known federal facilities, T-Mobile said in a call with Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julie Knapp, according to an ex parte filing. “A resolution bandwidth of 30 kHz was used for the scan of the spectrum between 1755-1800 MHz, with particular attention paid to the spectrum between 1755-1780 MHz,” the carrier said. “The equipment was calibrated for the noise floor before each scan and utilized both omni-directional and directional antennas pointed towards the federal facilities.”