In a February 24, 2005 email message (thoughtfully forwarded by Esme Vos of MuniWireless.com), Michael Calabrese, a Vice President of the New America Foundation (Spectrum Policy Project) writes:
Subject: Center Public Integrity Expose on spectrum speculators eating up white space in the TV bands
I'd like to call your attention to the Center for Public Integrity's expose, released today, revealing how spectrum speculators are accumulating Low Power TV licenses in a bid to "own" empty TV band channels ahead of the FCC's pending rule making to open TV "white space" (the wasted analog guard bands) to affordable community broadband on an unlicensed basis.
New America research associate Kartik Ramachandran identified the company, MS Communications, on which the Center for Public Integrity based its expose. This research, led by Jim Snider, is merely one example of a concerted broadcast industry effort to expropriate "white space" in the Channel 2-52 band -- a $6 billion grab (to date) described in the FCC Reply Comments we filed on behalf of a national coalition supporting the reallocation of unassigned TV channels for community broadband access.
You can view the expose at:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/printer-friendly.aspx?aid=602
You can view our Reply Comments describing the larger broadcast band spectrum grab at:
http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_File_2203_1.pdf (PDF download)
I hope this will lend credence to the argument that these TV band speculators should not be given more spectrum at the expense of unlicensed broadband and our economic future. Another question: why isn't the FCC stripping licenses away from these spectrum speculators?
Again, my conclusion of the aim of MS Communications is that they spotted the opportunity to "game" the FCC's arcane processes for licensing low-power television stations. This exchange is particularly enlightening:
When the Center queried the commission about MS Communications, an agency spokesperson replied in a written statement: "We can confirm that MS Communications is currently broadcasting over 201 LPTV licensed stations." In fact, Silberman is not broadcasting programming on any of those stations.
In Meridian, Miss., for instance, where MS Communications holds licenses for 12 low-power stations, the Center confirmed that nothing is currently being broadcast over any of the assigned channels. When asked about this, the FCC spokesperson replied that, as a matter of practice: "We trust that the licensee has indicated through filings that they are broadcasting and if they go off the air they have to apply for the authority to [do so]. The responsibility is in the licensee's hands to notify the FCC when they are no longer broadcasting and the reasons for doing so."
This illustrates just how badly the FCC is out of touch with the real world. Their "reality" is defined by the paperwork that MS Communications files with them on a regular basis... not the "ground truth" that the spectrum that MS Communications has "locked up" has not seen any productive use since it was granted by the FCC.
The New America Foundation filing is troubling. The filing does an excellent job of documenting the "grab everything you can" mentality of the television broadcasters in the conversion to digital television broadcasting. (NAF's Jim Snider was the first to inform me that, in blatant contrast to the original plan for digital broadcasting, the television broadcasters will now be allowed to retain television channels 2-13.) Simply, the broadcasters are very effectively Gaming the FCC system; all but inevitable given the broadcaster's legal prowess and the FCC's "paperwork is reality" environment. Such in-depth research is commendable, and a demonstrable reason to support the work of the New America Foundation.
The conclusion that I reach from the MS Communications story and the NAF Filing (after a second, careful reading) is that the activities aren't a "smoking gun" of deliberately trying to sabotage the potential license-exempt use of television broadcast spectrum.
Sadly, the MS Communications story, in a microcosm, is the real story, writ large of the FCC's spectrum allocation policies over the last century. Overall, the radio frequency spectrum is vastly underutilized. Every Hertz per second per square mile that is not used is lost forever. Unlike the environment in the past century that the FCC was designed to administer, we now have technologies that can make efficient, shared, non-interfering use of all the available spectrum... but most companies are afraid to try to do so, at least in the US. Such innovation will inevitably be driven to developing countries where an "MS Communications, aided and abetted by the FCC" mentality doesn't (yet) exist.
My impressions of the current leanings of the FCC in permitting license-exempt use of television broadcast spectrum involves the use of an embedded GPS receiver and a centrally-maintained, accessed-by-every-device database of "don't transmit on "this" channel if you're located "here". The MS Communications example nicely illustrates why such a model ultimately unworkable, or at best, not the most efficient approach.
This is exactly why, in my in-person testimony (PDF, you'll have to search) to the FCC at the August 9, 2002 Spectrum Policy Task Force hearing, I recommended a "ground truth" technique for determining where there was available "white space" in a given area's actual use of television broadcast spectrum.
(Begin transcript)
One of the things that Chairman Powell said this morning really struck me. He would really like to hear concrete proposals for how we get to the ideal of more of a spectrum commons model, flexible use and away from the private ownership model.
One thing that strikes me is that Mr. Tawil stated that they had gone down to using 288 megahertz of TV spectrum and what frustrates a lot of the techies and I've watched the 2.4 gigahertz thing band evolve very incredibly, long-range, very high bandwidth, many users, very dense deployments. They're making all that work in 83 megahertz of spectrum with some really onerous rules like very low power and they're making it work in that little chunk of spectrum in a very bad part of the spectrum for things like tree foliage.
The TV broadcasters have a total of 288 megahertz of spectrum available in the prime part of the spectrum and yet in any market, there's a handful of those channels that at most that are in use, 20. I'll be charitable and say 30. Why not evolve a model that lets a radio use the channels that are not being used for broadcasting and the radio has got to have a very specific limitation that it listens on a particular channel and if it hears TV broadcasting it just positively locks that up. There's no possibility of override. The radio just cannot go there if it hears a TV broadcast.
But the 75 percent of the other channels that aren't in use, that's legal, and it listens on a periodic basis every 10 minutes and that will encompass the ability to hear low powered TV stations, even somebody who's using one of these little rabbit transmitters that transmit on Channel 3 or 4 inside a house, it wouldn't interfere with 6 those. That's a way to get -- that's a way to at least start the transition into a more flexible use model. It's frustrating to hear the idea that that broadcast spectrum can't go there, no way, no how.
(End transcript)
It seems to me to be a very simple equation - if the television broadcast spectrum is actually in use for the originally licensed purpose - television broadcasting, then license-exempt use of that channel isn't allowed. "In use" is easily determined by the embedding of the essential elements of a television tuner - if an analog or digital television transmission is decoded, that's "in use" as far as the license-exempt radio is concerned, which will then go on to use another channel that isn't in use.
Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2005 by Steve Stroh