‘Withhold Final Judgment’ on Auction Treatment of Broadcasters Until Final Rules Released, CTIA Says
NAB CEO Gordon Smith should “withhold final judgment” on the FCC’s treatment of broadcasters in the TV incentive auction rules “until he sees what the final rules are and he hears from his own members and others in the broadcast industry” about the order, said CTIA Vice President-Government Affairs Jot Carpenter on an upcoming episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators. The interview will be available online Friday and will run on C-SPAN2 Monday. Smith said during a speech at the NAB Show in April that “ours is the only industry the auction can actually harm,” saying later “it is at best an open question” whether the FCC has balanced the aims of freeing up more spectrum and protecting the broadcasters.
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That remains an open question because the FCC “hasn’t completed its rulemaking,” Carpenter said. “Just like Mr. Smith’s members are waiting, our members are waiting to see what kind of rules the commission is going to put forward. I don’t think that there’s a deliberate attempt on the part of the commission to injure the broadcast industry.” The incentive auction is structured to be voluntary, and it has always been expected that a subset of broadcasters would not participate under any circumstance, Carpenter said. But the auction could open up new possibilities for broadcasters to innovate by using channel sharing, which a recent CTIA pilot project found could be attractive for independent stations and cash-strapped stations without degrading those stations’ signal, he said. NAB did not comment.
The incentive auction and the upcoming AWS-3 auction will be a “very nice down payment” on the National Broadband Plan’s spectrum goals, “but they probably don’t get us all the way to where we need to be,” Carpenter said. The AWS-3 auction, set for the end of this year, will make 65 MHz available. While how much spectrum will become available through the incentive auction is unclear, CTIA is optimistic about 84 MHz will be offered, he said. Spectrum from those two auctions and the recent H-block auction should yield a total of about 150 MHz, only part of the way to achieving the National Broadband Plan’s goal of making 500 MHz available by 2020, he said.
Additional spectrum will likely need to be freed up through spectrum sharing involving both commercial and government spectrum, though CTIA continues to believe that clearing is preferable where possible, Carpenter said. CTIA is in favor of geographic sharing and temporal sharing, he said. Frequency hopping “sounds neat” and may be promising in the future, but a lack of commercially scalable technology makes it impractical right now, he said. The FCC’s work on the 3.5 GHz band is also promising and “may be a good sharing example,” he said.