I have to give Donny Jackson credit for his latest article about the distressing state of the 800 MHz rebanding process. It's thought-provoking, it's right on target, and most importantly, it calls on all parties to put the public's safety first by acting swiftly to fix the problem.
First some background, courtesy of the
RadioReference Wiki. (also, see the
FCC website for additional info on interference in the 800MHz band).
When the 800 MHz band was originally created, public safety was assigned a set of frequencies, and incumbent commercial service providers were allowed to operate on the remainder of frequencies in the band. However, unlike in other bands where licensee types were allocated to contiguous blocks of frequencies, in the 800 MHz band, public safety and certain commercial services (primarily Nextel) were interwoven.
The result: low-powered public safety channels located adjacent to higher-powered commercial services experienced significant radio interference. First responder communications became garbled and fuzzy. In some instances they were completely unable to transmit.
When first responders aren't able to effectively and reliably communicate with each other, an already dangerous job is made even more dangerous. In addition, when they can't communicate they can't coordinate their actions, and that puts the lives of the communities they protect at increased risk, too.
To correct the problem, the FCC ordered the "rebanding" of the 800 MHz spectrum. In short, rebanding involves extracting the commercial frequencies interwoven with the public safety frequencies. The goal would be to have a contiguous block of frequencies reserved exclusively for public safety, and a separate, contiguous block of frequencies reserved exclusively for commercial wireless services.
The FCC ordered Nextel to take the lead in, and pay for the cost of, vacating from the 800 MHz band where the Nextel technology was causing the interference. That was three years ago, and as MRT Magazine reports:
...not a single public-safety licensee has been rebanded during this time; in fact, none are even scheduled to move to their new frequencies, even though the two-year mark of what was supposed to be a three-year project is just eight weeks away. And no scheduling will begin until the FCC acts on a joint letter from public safety and Sprint Nextel asking that the Transition Administrator be authorized to establish a revised timetable, which likely will extend rebanding at least two additional years. [emphasis added]
Two ADDITIONAL years! There's been so much talk about interoperable communications in recent years, and rightly so, but this remains a critical public safety issue, too. Where has the urgency with correcting interference in the 800MHz band gone?
Wanna get mad?
Read the article here.
