The FCC Friday released its competitive bidding NPRM, approved earlier in the week by commissioners (CD Oct 10 p1). Commissioners in statements released with the NPRM (http://bit.ly/1snehak) disagreed vehemently on whether the agency goes the wrong direction in the proposed rules. Commissioner Ajit Pai said the NPRM opens the door for designated entities to buy spectrum and then immediately lease it to others, while building nothing. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn responded that nothing in the law requires DEs to offer only facilities-based services.
Short-form applications filed for the AWS-3 auction ran significantly below the numbers in the two past major auctions, 700 MHz and AWS-1 (CD Oct 2 p5). But the news is not all bad for the FCC, which hopes to raise big dollars and make a major down payment on FirstNet, industry officials tell us. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all jumped in, as has Dish Network, according to filings at the FCC.
The FCC’s first-of-its-kind auction may present complexities beyond the technical details for longtime telecom attorneys with clients that may sell broadcast-TV frequencies to the agency or wireless carriers that may be wanting to buy that relinquished spectrum for wireless broadband. Such firms representing multiple clients in the incentive auction, which government and industry officials have called extremely complex, may face challenges avoiding conflicts of interest, said wireless and broadcast attorneys in recent interviews. Firms that represent both wireless and broadcast clients -- such as Wilkinson Barker and Wiley Rein -- may not be able to do so in the auction, under local bar association ethics rules or possibly FCC anti-collusion rules, the attorneys said. Since the parties are buyer and seller on opposite sides, firms may not be able to act for both kinds of participants in the auction expected to raise many billions of dollars.
Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel urged the FCC to look at some nontraditional bands, as low as 400 MHz and as high as 90 GHz, as one way of addressing a looming spectrum crisis. Rosenworcel also called for an examination of whether some federal laws, such as the Miscellaneous Receipts Act, are limiting the ability of government agencies to move more quickly to other frequencies, speaking Monday at the GSMA 360 North America conference in Atlanta. The FCC put her remarks online (http://bit.ly/1uyreeB).
Ex-FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Robert McDowell clashed over media consolidation, and had differing views on how news and information accessibility has evolved. Comcast’s planned buy of Time Warner Cable should have been “dead upon arrival” when it arrived at the FCC, Copps said during an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators to be shown over the weekend. It’s “highly inimical to the interests of consumers and competition,” said Copps, special adviser to Common Cause. He bemoaned consolidation, saying it creates “huge companies that control distribution and content,” and that they're getting a hammerlock on the news and information infrastructure “that we as a democracy rely upon to govern ourselves. McDowell said Comcast/TWC and AT&T’s deal to buy DirecTV probably will be OK'd.
House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., plans to speak on various technology and telecom topics Sept. 18 during a Hudson Institute event. She will join Robert McDowell, a former Republican FCC commissioner and visiting fellow at Hudson, for a noon-1 p.m. discussion at the institute’s Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center at 1015 15th St. NW. “As net neutrality, the future of Internet governance, and spectrum auctions continue to make headlines, Congresswoman Eshoo is in the middle of it all as a key player,” the Hudson invitation said, saying Eshoo will share her thoughts on those issues (http://bit.ly/1pOLgmH). Earlier this year, McDowell and Eshoo had tried to schedule such a discussion, formerly more focused on net neutrality, but had to postpone on multiple occasions.
The U.S. experience demonstrates that spectrum auctions, when done right, are a successful mechanism for maximizing the use of spectrum, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said in a speech Monday to the IX International Regulatory Workshop in Cartagena De Indias, Colombia. Pai released his written remarks Tuesday (http://bit.ly/W7gxUx). “Auctions are more successful when they are kept simple, transparent, and market-driven,” he said. “That means setting clear rules in advance and sticking with them. That means avoiding onerous conditions on particular spectrum. That means giving everyone a fair opportunity to bid. These are the best ways to promote network construction, to raise money for the treasury, and to give consumers the benefits of innovative new services.” Pai also said flexible use policies and a robust secondary market have been critical to the rollout of wireless. The FCC is committed to reviewing deals in the transfer of spectrum from one company to another within 180 days of applications being filed, he said. “This is a good thing. By providing procedural certainty, the FCC has enabled spectrum to flow more freely to its highest value use.” The FCC also allows licensees to sell off part of their holdings, Pai noted. “We have found that these secondary market policies have encouraged spectrum efficiency and reduced transaction costs,” he said. “Indeed, there have been thousands of secondary-market transactions involving mobile broadband licenses over the past several years.” The FCC has also authorized local experiments to examine the aftereffects of the IP transition, he noted. “We are going to see what happens when aging infrastructure is turned off,” he said. “These tests will give us valuable data. And we will then use that data to make a successful national transition to all-IP networks. Once that happens, companies will be able to focus their investments exclusively on high-speed networks.”
The FCC opted to put a heavier burden on satellite operators to pay the regulatory fees that fund agency operations, in an order released Friday. The agency did not make any decisions on whether to reallocate agency employees for the purpose of calculating fees after the wireless industry raised concerns.
Wireless carriers are pressing the FCC for a waiver of the agency’s former defaulter rule, operating on a quick timeline as deadlines approach for the AWS-3 auction, agency officials told us. If Chairman Tom Wheeler agrees, the agency would have to pivot slightly from the approach proposed by Wheeler Aug. 1, when he circulated a competitive bidding NPRM, seeking comment on designated entity (DE) rules, joint bidding rules and proposing changes to the former defaulter rule (CD Aug 4 p1).
LTE-Advanced network deployments have been increasing this year, ABI Research said Tuesday in a report, saying about 60 LTE-Advanced deployments, commitments or trials were underway during Q1. Twenty-two commitments were in Western Europe, 16 were in the Asia-Pacific region and five in North America, ABI said. Carriers are finding LTE-Advanced attractive because it includes the carrier aggregation (CA) feature, which allows carriers to “utilize all spectrum resources to increase data rates,” said ABI research analyst Marina Lu in a news release. “In France, Bouygues Telecom first utilized CA to launch LTE-Advanced in six cities in mid-June, 2014, while Orange France and SFR also announced they will commercially deploy LTE-Advanced.” Voice over LTE is also increasing its market traction this year, ABI said. The ABI report also said about 75 percent of the upcoming 4G spectrum auctions will be in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region or Latin America (http://bit.ly/1vE50N7).