FCC boss gives ex-Nextel man okay on 700MHz

AN INTERESTING bit of Washington DC insider horse trading took place this week.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the awarding of 10MHz of the 700MHz spectrum to be used for developing emergency communications to the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), which was the sole bidder. PSST was awarded this portion of the spectrum because they receive “advisory assistance” from Cyren Call.

Who is the “Wizard of Oz” behind the scenes pulling the strings at Cyren Call? None other than ex-Nextel co-founder Morgan O'Brien who has been able to move from his 1980's job as an attorney into selling Nextel to Sprint for $35 billion in 2005.

By the way, back in 2001 when O'Brien was negotiating to sell Nextel to Sprint, he had the able assistance of many friends including Chief Harlin R. McEwen, Chairman of the Communications & Technology Committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Chief McEwen “just happened” to morph into Chairman of PSST.

For history buffs among INQminds, the 700MHz saga goes like this:

In 1996, Congress gave broadcasters unallocated spectrum in exchange for broadcasters' promises to move to digital television and to return 108MHz of “analog” broadcast spectrum (Channels 52-68). Digital efficiency lets the broadcasters move closer together lower down the dial. They promised 24MHz to public safety. Another 60MHz was to be auctioned for commercial use, part of which is now called the “C” block.

The FCC proposed various “band plans” (based on 1997 era technology). They divided the 24MHz public safety into 12MHz for voice and 12MHz for data, to be distributed as standard regional licenses. Then the FCC sat back and waited for the broadcasters to keep their promises and migrate to digital. Between 1996 and today, there have been many false start dates for the promised digital migration. The broadcasters now promise, this final time, that they will make the big change to DTV (Digital Television) in January 2009.

So what makes 700MHz spectrum so important, you ask? Radio waves in this band travel farther, penetrate physical objects better, and bend around obstructions better than in any other band likely to become available in the foreseeable future.

As a result of this electronic magic, it becomes economically, and technically, possible to have really high-speed-wireless-broadband access using licenses with fewer frequency bands. It takes a lot fewer tower sites to cover an area, and becomes easier in urban areas to deal with the “concrete canyons” and other topography issues that make commercial mobile phone service difficult.

The FCC decided during the run up from 1996 to Spring 2007 that there was big wonga to be made by auctioning off parts of the 700MHz spectrum to the highest bidder. Below is the FCC map of the available spectrum, which runs from 698-806MHz. The yellow sections have already been auctioned off. The gray sections are reserved for the nationwide public safety broadband network that PSST and vendor friends will build out over the next five to ten years. The remaining white sections A,B,C,D, and E blocks are what will be offered at auction early next year.

The big deals are the "C" and "D" blocks. The “C” block covers two 11MHz chunks of spectrum that can be bid on together, making 22MHz available for national commercial use. This is a prime spectrum that Verizon and others would like to get their hands on.

In regards to this spectrum, Goo gle requested, and got, the FCC to make changes to the upcoming auction rules. The wanted the changes because their goal is to make Android, their mobile operating system, which will run on femtocell towers, the premier choice for mobile phones by showing how well it all works on their system. Google's boss, Eric Schmidt, says they are a willing high stakes bidder -- to the tune of nearly $5 billion US Greenbacks for the “C” block.

Did we mention that Cupertino's manufacturer of entertainment gear - aka Apple says it also wanta buy into this 700MHz high stakes poker tournament? The skyrocketing sales of Iphone's musical PDA should help prepare Stevey Jobs' bank balance for the bidding wars. INQminds wonder how well an iPhone will work for Inspector Knacker chasing after a less than friendly crook?

Along the Yellow Brick Road to 700MHz public safety interoperability nirvana, various competitors popped up. The builders of high tech stuff have been after these frequencies for more than a decade. Same with spectrum-poor wireless carriers like T-Mobile. In 2005, they joined up with Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft to form the High-Tech DTV Coalition.

The High-Tech DTV Coalition struck a pact with public safety officials, who were also motivated to get spectrum from incumbent broadcasters. Remember Congress in 1996 had promised public safety 24 of the 108 megahertz once the conversion to DTV was complete. That promise has gone bye bye as broadcasters claimed the technology wasn't quite ready for prime time. (Possibly they took a page from the auto industry play book about fuel economy standards?) Since nobody has heard lately from High-Tech DTV Coalition, they are obviously no longer a player.

In 2006, along came Cyren Call which rallied public safety officials by lobbying that 24MHz was not enough for interoperable communications. Cyren Call wanted to devote 30MHz and give that to a Public Safety Broadband Trust – now called Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST).

Cyber Call's Morgan O'Brien is acknowledged as better at the game of P. T. Barnum self-promotion than most. He'd used his good-old-boy ways of convincing politicians to lean on FCC staffers to give him radio spectrum before. In 1990, he used this strategy to convert his radio-dispatcher frequencies into cell-phone licenses and jump start cellular carrier FleetCall.

In 2002, his company, then called Nextel, did it again. With the help of Rudy Giuliani and his Giuliani Partners lobbying firm, Nextel partnered with public safety. They eventually persuaded the FCC to agree to its plan of swapping a disjointed band of frequencies for a contiguous 10MHz national license.

“If there were a Nobel Prize for lobbying, I would give it to Nextel and Morgan O’Brien,” said J.H. Snider, research director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program.

This week's allocation for 10MHz of the 700 MHz spectrum to public safety has been heavily pushed behind the scenes by O'Brien and Cyren Call. O’Brien has not been above asking US Congress to simply give spectrum to Cyren Call so they could “manage it” for public safety communications.

Next competitor to be vanquished by O'Brien and his friends was Janice Obuchowski, who had been the executive director of short lived High-Tech DTV Coalition. She joined former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt to float an alternative, Frontline Wireless, which would gobble only 10 additional megahertz for public safety.

After PSST's sole bid award this week, McEwen and O'Brien showed that nobody else was much of a serious player in the high stakes poker game of public safety interoperability 700MHz spectrum.

Back in December 2006, Harold Feld, a Senior Vice President of the Media Access Project, a non-profit, public interest, telecommunications law firm, and knowledgeable commentator on radio spectrum allocation said this of Cyren Call's ideas:

“The promise to make the “Public Safety Trust” the real licensee and Cyren Call “only” a contractor is supposed to address this objection by leaving the “public safety community” the ones “in control.” But again, anyone with experience in telecom knows how that game works. Cyren Call, as the party most intimately involved with the proposal, will have huge influence over how the Public Safety Trust gets structured and who gets appointed to it first. Then it will get a bunch of favorable contracts signed that lock in Cyren Call as the company that actually runs things. The Public Safety Trust will have as much authority over Cyren Call as Queen Elizabeth II has over “her” Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

Some where along the Yellow Brick Road of 700MHz public safety interoperability, the competition repeatedly folded their cards. The result is that PSST, with the benevolent assistance of O'Brien and Cyren Call, submitted the only bid for the 10MHz public safety band of 700MHz spectrum. If you read old western novels you could think of this as a range war over spectrum and maybe there are more than just a few cattle rustlers coveting our public air waves.

A few questions for PSST and Cyren Call:

Who will be designated vendor of choice for radio equipment?

If it is Motorola's Public Safety Division, there is a blatantly political youtube.com video by Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films about how poorly Motorola's radios worked during the 9-11 Twin Towers disaster in New York City.

Will the PSST designated radios be APCO P25 Phase 2 complaint with this the proposed standard – a two-slot TDMA Trunking Air Interface?

Who will allocate the 10MHz of spectrum among regional first responders? Which agency - police, fire, or ambulance - will be given the highest priority to operate on how much of the 10MHz public safety chunk of 700MHz spectrum?

Will air ambulance responders be allowed to talk on 700MHz from the air-to-ground? Or will this be only a ground-to-ground public safety radio system? Today first responders on the ground now must switch radio bands to talk with air ambulance helicopters. Will PSST and Cyber Call fix this roadblock to efficient rescue missions?

INQUIRING minds wanta know. µ