FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel will never forget day one of the partial shutdown of the government, she told a sold-out FCBA lunch audience Tuesday. “I pull into the building and there’s a giant sign that tells you that the agency is closed, and please go away. So it was quiet. And the quiet became eerie. And by the second week, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see tumbleweeds in the halls.” Her conversation with FCBA President Joe Di Scipio covered the gamut of communication policy, as Rosenworcel offered her opinions on everything from foreign ownership (it’s time for a fresh look), to the IP transition (she’s in favor of trials), to her favorite app (anything that keeps her children quiet on a plane).

Expanding the ability of consumers to offload their data needs onto Wi-Fi is a better way to address the “spectrum crunch” than auctioning off wireless bands, said New America Foundation Wireless Future Project Director Michael Calabrese at an NCTA presentation on his cable spectrum report (http://bit.ly/bRNbEs) which was published by Time Warner Cable (CD Oct 10 p14). The report urges policymakers to prioritize the release of unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi use to accommodate consumers’ increasing data needs, which he said can’t be met with licensed spectrum alone. “Clearing spectrum for auction takes too long, it’s too expensive and at best delays the inevitable transition to small cells” and other ways of moving data, said Calabrese.

Broadcast lawyer John Hane warned Tuesday that the incentive auction could fail if the FCC doesn’t get things right. “There are many, many, many paths to failure and only a fairly narrow set of paths to success,” said Hane of Pillsbury Winthrop during a panel at an Institute for Policy Innovation conference.

The FCC delayed to Jan. 22 the start of the H-block auction, which had been scheduled to get underway Jan. 14, it said in a notice released Monday (bit.ly/1i94GKc). The auction’s timing had been a bone of contention at the FCC, with Commissioner Ajit Pai favoring the earliest possible auction and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel favoring a sale later in the year. In September, the bureau scheduled a Jan. 14 auction with a $1.6 billion reserve price (CD Sept 16 p1) after Dish Network agreed to meet that price. Carriers are also interested in the band, which is adjacent to the PCS block, FCC officials said in September.

T-Mobile disputed many of the arguments in a September paper by former FCC Chief Economist Leslie Marx, which argued that the FCC should not restrict bidding in the TV incentive auction (http://bit.ly/1evJAbs). Marx wrote the paper for Verizon, and T-Mobile made a counter filing. “Professor Marx first asserts that AT&T and Verizon are unlikely to foreclose smaller carriers from the 600 MHz auction,” T-Mobile said. “She claims there is a highly liquid market for low-frequency spectrum, identifies a number of low-frequency spectrum transactions, and professes surprise that neither Sprint nor T-Mobile have pursued secondary market transactions to acquire spectrum. In fact, the secondary market for low-frequency spectrum is highly illiquid and fragmented.” T-Mobile countered Marx’s reliance “on the unstated but incorrect assumption that low-frequency spectrum is valuable only to expand network capacity.” “The greatest value of low-frequency spectrum, though, is not to expand network capacity, but rather to enhance network coverage indoors and out,” T-Mobile said. “No commenter in this proceeding, other than Verizon and AT&T, has argued that non-dominant carriers want to acquire 600 MHz spectrum to increase capacity. Whether Sprint and T-Mobile are capacity constrained is thus irrelevant to their potential to be foreclosed.” The FCC will impose restrictions on who can bid in the incentive auction, predicted Anant Raut, a former FTC attorney and antitrust counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1gqTBse). “Some commentators have looked to Chairman-elect [Tom] Wheeler’s comments as the head of a trade association in the private sector for clues as to whether he will let AT&T and Verizon bid on all of the available spectrum,” Raut wrote. “Bad sleuthing. ... Once confirmed, Chairman Wheeler will be representing the Administration, and the Administration has already spoken, to an extent, through another Executive Branch filing -- the DOJ’s comments calling for an allocated spectrum auction. Look for the Commission to decide by a partisan 3-2 vote to set aside certain blocks of spectrum” for competitors to AT&T and Verizon.

With the FCC about to transition to a new chairman and all proceedings on hold for the government shutdown, it’s hard to know if cable industry efforts to free up unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi will be successful, said several communications attorneys and industry observers in interviews. Cable needs unlicensed spectrum to bridge the gap between consumer demand for mobile broadband and the available wireless spectrum, said New America Foundation Wireless Future Project Director Michael Calabrese in a report sponsored by Time Warner Cable released last week (CD Oct 10 p14). “There’s no possible way the industry can meet consumer demand for movable data at affordable prices using only licensed spectrum,” he told us. “We need to have a second path.”

Any proposal to limit Verizon Wireless’s or AT&T’s participation in the TV incentive auction will hurt consumers and the cost will be “literally -- incalculable,” said a white paper released by the Digital Policy Institute Monday. The paper said T-Mobile has the most to gain by restrictions “given the four national players’ relative spectrum positions” and Sprint’s already considerable spectrum holdings (http://bit.ly/16I1Da4).

The FCC will hold a workshop Oct. 24 on unlicensed wireless and the incentive auction of TV spectrum, said a notice released Monday (http://bit.ly/GzyCTr). The workshop is part of the FCC’s Learn Everything About Reverse-Auctions Now Program. “The workshop will focus on the benefits and uses of unlicensed spectrum in the existing and future television bands white spaces and in the guard bands of the new 600 MHz band following the upcoming incentive auction, as well as technical questions associated with proposed unlicensed operations in the 600 MHz ban,” the notice said.

Deploying TD-LTE at 600 MHz “will result in both efficiency losses and operational deficiencies,” T-Mobile US representatives said Thursday during a meeting with officials from the FCC Wireless Bureau, the Office of Engineering and Technology and the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, said an ex parte report carrier counsel Trey Hanbury filed Monday. TD-LTE in low-frequency spectrum has “link budget deficits and performance constraints compared to FDD LTE as well as real-world limitations on the feasibility of variable downlink-uplink configurations,” Hanbury said in the filing. “TD-LTE may function as an alternative for supplemental downlink spectrum, but guard band requirements must be considered in that scenario.” T-Mobile representatives also urged the FCC to consider terrain topology and morphology when it sets exclusion zones. In Seattle, for example, “failing to account for the surrounding mountains that block transmissions would result in larger exclusion zones than required to protect wireless broadband services in adjacent markets from harmful interference,” Hanbury said (http://bit.ly/16XLL2O).

Verizon and AT&T will spread their wireless competition to LTE video services in 2014 using recently acquired spectrum, said their chief executives Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York. The carriers are lining up content deals, and Verizon expects to deliver the Super Bowl to subscribers in February, CEO Lowell McAdam said. AT&T will begin deployments by mid-2014 and expects the service will “mature to scale” within three years, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told us.