TETRA Association Comes Out Swinging

TETRA Association Comes Out Swinging

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.<--break->Since we are running into similar issues with other technologies, we want either the TETRA Association or the FCC to unequivocally state that TETRA is designed to operate on 25 kHz exclusive use channels (that would be FB8 channel designations) in the 450-470 MHz band. Or, either the TETRA Association or the FCC must state that if this technology is deployed on shared channels (that would be FB2 or FB6 channel designations), that the TETRA systems will have the ability to monitor impacted channels up and down for communications in progress as required within the rules, so that we don’t have spectrum chaos. This is not an issue for 800 MHz deployments as all channels are exclusive in that environment.

 

In response to EWA’s earlier filing, the TETRA Association advised the Commission that “There is no reason to believe that the FCC’s applicable coordination rules would be suspended because TETRA technology is being used, or as a result of the grant of the waiver request, which did not seek a waiver of the frequency coordination rule.” We agree, and that sounds fair on paper, but I’ll feel a lot better when the FCC understands EWA’s simple ask. In the old days, we didn’t need to shine a bright light on these types of technical matters.