Chairman of Public Safety Spectrum calls on government to eliminate public safety spectrum costs
Chief Harlin McEwen, chairman of Public Safety Spectrum Trust, said today that the Federal Communications Commission should consider drastically reducing or even eliminating the reserve price it has placed on the public safety spectrum on the 700MHz band.
WASHINGTON D.C. – Chief Harlin McEwen, chairman of Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), said today that the Federal Communications Commission should consider drastically reducing or even eliminating the reserve price it has placed on the public safety spectrum on the 700MHz band.
McEwen, whose PSST is the official licensee of a 10MHz chunk of spectrum that is adjacent to the so-called “D block” of spectrum that had been reserved for building a nationwide wireless public safety network, told the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) today the government no longer needed to charge such a high reserve price for the spectrum because it had raised so much money in the 700MHz auction last month. The D block was the only chunk of spectrum not to meet its $1.3 billion reserve price at the 700MHz auction, which raised $19.6 billion in total bids. McEwen said he hoped that the FCC would consider at least lowering the reserve price to attract more bidders at future auctions, which he expects to occur sometime early this fall.
“I don’t think there’s any need to raise $1.3 billion in any future D block auction,” he said. “They raised twice the amount that was expected in the rest of the auction, they met the congressional expectations, and so raising money isn’t an issue.” have said that the D block’s high reserve price, along with the rules that the FCC had placed on the D block, were prohibitive for companies interested in running services on the spectrum. For instance, the FCC has mandated that the D block licensee will be responsible for building out a national public safety network with 75% population coverage within four years of getting the license, and 99% population coverage within 10 years. McEwen said today that while he’d consider changing the time requirements for achieving those coverage rates, he would prefer to keep to the current schedule, since building a nationwide next-generation emergency response network is so crucial to national security.
Some analysts
Morgan O’Brien, chairman of PSST advisor Cyren Call, told the WCA that his company was currently scouting and engaging a wide variety of potential suitors for the future D block auction more aggressively than it had before the previous auction. The goal, O’Brien said, is to better communicate the FCC’s expectations for how much space the future D block licensee will have to cover, how it will work with the PSST and what deadlines it will have to meet.
“To be the right partner for public safety, the communications provider has to be willing to do things that a normal communications partner would not do,” he said. “For instance, they’ll have to spend money ensuring reliability of sites and provide coverage into areas that don’t meet the test of return on investment that are normally required for commercial investment.”
When asked how he planned to convince companies to engage in an expensive project that didn’t meet their traditional ROI requirements, O’Brien said that competitive pressures from big carriers such as Verizon and AT&T would give potential bidders incentive to want to operate such a valuable chunk of spectrum.
“This is a historic opportunity that’s being created here,” he said. “It’s a compelling opportunity to have a 20MHz nationwide license and also a relationship with a user group that is as strong and as valuable as public safety. . . . I’d ask companies to look at the spectrum positions of two big carriers and say, ‘What are you doing to keep up with them?’”
