mcrosby's blog

I read in the FCC’s releases earlier this week that Shelby County, Alabama was granted  waivers, in one respect a partial waiver, to operate a VHF trunked system that will use both public safety and Industrial/Business frequencies. Good for them. The details may be reviewed in the Commission’s Order, but know that EWA had weighed in previously in this licensing matter requesting that if Shelby County wanted to use Business/Industrial spectrum, that its application meet all applicable spectrum availability, engineering, and inter-service concurrence policies.

There has been a lot of industry concern expressed by those that have been working diligently to comply with the FCC’s narrowbanding mandate, both service providers and licensees alike, about Congressman Rothman’s (D-NJ) bill (H.R.3430) that proposes to extend the narrowbanding mandate by two years.  Does this have any chance? Are you kidding me? These expressions pretty much sum up the breadth of the inquiries EWA has received since this bill was introduced on November 15^th, and immediately referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The FCC’s Office of Engineering Technology recently announced that the testing of the first TV White Spaces database demonstrated that the database “worked.” Ok, a couple definitions of “worked” include that a certain activity performed a function as intended or operated as expected. In this case, we suspect that the FCC’s pronouncement presumably meant that the database accurately contained all incumbent facilities that are to be protected from white space devices. Not too difficult an exercise.

If AT&T didn’t see it coming, I don’t believe that the FCC saw it coming either.  That is, the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) antitrust suit to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger that was filed yesterday in the U.S.

It’s a simple ask …
 
The TETRA Association came out swinging in response to EWA and a few other industry organizations who raised a few questions about how the FCC arrived at its conclusion that certain certified TETRA equipment is good to go in the 450-470 MHz and 817-824/862-869 MHz bands. Without getting into the gory details of the other issues which will be the subject of further comments in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making concerned with this technology, EWA simply asked the Commission to please clarify its position that there “is no need for prior coordination” should an incumbent licensee choose to migrate to TETRA technology.