FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski presented plans for reallocating spectrum during a speech on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., at the Innovation Economy Conference (pdf) and talked up a revision of the Universal Service Fund program.
There may be opportunities for broadcasters to share 6 MHz channels in a market “without significantly disrupting the free-over-the-air television service consumers enjoy today,” the FCC said Dec. 2 in his Innovation in a Broadband World speech.
The request for comment (pdf) asks about the benefits of using spectrum for over-the-air broadcast vs. for wireless broadband services, including the impact on jobs, consumer welfare, “innovation and other indicators of global leadership.”
The FCC wants to know how broadcasters use their spectrum allocations for HD, multicast and mobile TV, what the business rationalization is behind that use, and how broadcasters plan to use the spectrum in the future.
Broadcast spectrum is considered beachfront property for wireless broadband because of its propagation characteristics, and the request for comment is focused on the broadcast band. Commenters will have until Dec. 21 to weigh in.
Broadband adviser Blair Levin is responsible for overseeing the national broadband plan, due by February 2010. Among the possibilities are restricting over-the-air stations to a single standard definition channel, and requiring each network affiliate to be one of a group of subchannels of a single channel, with HDTV only available from a MVPD.
CTIA says, “it is pleased the FCC has issued a Public Notice on uses of spectrum to gather the facts and to ensure the U.S. wireless industry remains the world’s most competitive and innovative. We think this is a logical outgrowth of our recent filings suggesting that the Commission should consider reallocation of broadcaster spectrum.”
The National Association of Broadcasters disapproves of spectrum sharing. They prefer to keep all the unused broadcast spectrum for themselves, even though they pay taxpayers nothing for their airwaves. That’s because broadcasters were once perceived as a “public service”.
The Federal Communications Commission also wants to overhaul the $7 billion Universal Service Fund to help pay for universal broadband and reallocate wireless spectrum for new wireless broadband services. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski presented plans for revising the USF program and reallocating spectrum during his speech at The Innovation Economy Conference yesterday (pdf).
USF is a multi-billion dollar annual fund that continues to support yesterday’s communications infrastructure. The goal of universality is as important as ever — and to meet our country’s innovation goals, we need to reorient the fund to support broadband communications. This is a thorny issue, with no shortage of practical and statutory challenges. We need to wring savings out of the system, protect consumers, avoid flashcuts, while ultimately moving USF in the direction it needs to go to support our 21st century platform for innovation.
The Universal Service Fund (USF) was created by the FCC in 1997 to meet the goals of Universal Service as mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It mandates that all providers of telecommunications services contribute to fund to provide service nearly everywhere in the United States. That mandate covers only voice communications — not data.
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