Effective Monday, March 12th, there are now three and only three public safety organizations that have the coveted FCC-certified frequency advisory committee medallion. On February 22nd, IMSA/IAFC and FCCA announced that they had joined their respective frequency coordination forces under a single organization called the Public Safety...
We have been watching with much interest for several years now the ongoing effort to minimize avian (bird) mortalities that result from those unfortunate instances when migrating birds happens to misjudge and, er, fly into a communications tower or guy wires. This is a meaningful issue as evidenced by the substantial amount of time, energy and...
We are receiving numerous comments from members expressing their concern over HR 607 - the "Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011" that was introduced by Congressman Peter King (R-NY) and six other representatives on February 10th. This bill closely mirrors Senate legislation that proposes to repurpose all 10 MHz of the D-Block at 700 MHz...
The FCC released a News Release earlier today announcing the 45-day public testing of the “First Television White Spaces Database.” This is important news as one of the more critical requirements that must be accommodated before white space devices are certified to roam free within TV and land mobile spectrum is that they know to recognize the “do...
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...
EWA had no choice but to file a Second TETRA Clarification Request with the Commission on October 26th as the agency just seems to keep missing critical information in its Orders and, at least in EWA’s view, has provided inconsistent statements on how applicants may best license this technology. Unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences...
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?...
I suspect that many folks this time of year have wish lists. I do. Wouldn’t it be nice if the FCC lifted the 900 MHz new Industrial/Business system licensing freeze that hasn’t been necessary for over two years now. As a result of the continued freeze, use of this valuable spectrum resource is lost and big time companies like UPS and John...
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...
For a while there, there just didn’t seem to be a lot of wireless regulatory news to report.