This may be why wireless is getting dumped.
US Commerce Department To Postpone ‘3G’ Auction Deadline
By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
05 Sep 2001, 11:50 AM CST
The U.S. Commerce Department intends to ask Congress to postpone by two years a key deadline in an upcoming auction of licenses for third-generation – or “3G” – advanced wireless services.
Nancy Victory, the new chief of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said the agency would ask Congress to postpone the September 2002 deadline for receipt of auction proceeds until Sept. 30, 2004.
The delay would buy federal agencies more time to work through problems raised by a mandate to transfer blocks of government-owned airwaves to the private sector for use in commercial 3G services.
“We expect later today or tomorrow to transmit legislation to postpone that for two years to give sufficient time for this process to take place,” Victory told reporters today.
The announcement comes just two weeks after a General Accounting Office report that found that the current auction schedule could endanger national security if the Defense Department is not given additional time to study the matter.
Last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to Capitol Hill asking lawmakers not to move the agency off its current spectrum bands "until truly comparable spectrum is identified and made available.”
Victory said the postponement was not a sign that the ongoing assessment might take another two years.
“This is a recognition of the GAO study that more time is needed in order to take a closer look at this issue,” she said.
The two bands of airwaves to be affected by the proposal – the 1710- to 1755-MHz and the 2110- to 2150-MHz bands – are used by the Defense Department to transmit sensitive data via satellite. The department says inference issues rule out any type of spectrum-sharing proposals, and the agency claims it will would not be able to vacate the bands until 2010.
While spectrum is a finite resource, the number of alternatives that the government has to consider are dwindling. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last month said it was prepared to pull from consideration a swathe of airwaves used to provide using wireless educational programming and other fixed-wireless providers.
If the FCC follows through on its proposal not to relocate those providers from their perch, it could put additional pressure on the military to give up its coveted airwaves. The FCC has alternatively proposed clearing four tracts of wireless airwaves currently occupied by amateur radio enthusiasts and unlicensed personal communications services (PCS).
Victory said the NTIA was working “aggressively” with the FCC, the National Security Council, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the National Economic Council to come up with “creative” solutions to the 3G allocation problems.
Delaying the proceeds from the auction means the government could be forced to find or cut billions of dollars to accommodate budget outlays for the coming fiscal year. The move also is likely to upset the plans of satellite and wireless providers, who have been eyeing the valuable spectrum bands as a means to expand their high-speed mobile networks. |
