Rebanding redux?

Several industry observers have drawn parallels between this episode and another interference dispute that occurred a decade ago — interference from Nextel Communications (now part of Sprint) to LMR operations in the 800 MHz swath that led to the massive reconfiguration of the band.

Like LightSquared, Nextel promised to better utilize a portion of spectrum and provide greater competition in the commercial wireless market, while creating jobs and making significant private investment, said mobile wireless consultant Andrew Seybold.

“There were people who raised the alarm on that — including me — who said, ‘This isn’t going to work. You can’t mix LMR and cellular,'” Seybold said. “The Nextel owners came in and said, ‘We’re talking about competition.’

“Remember, that’s when there were only two competitors per market, and they said, ‘We’re going to offer a third cellular [competitor]. Look at all the new jobs we’re going to create. Look at all the new cell sites we’re going to build.’ And it was voted in on the merit of jobs and money, not technology — over everybody’s objections.”

A similar pattern was repeated in 2010, when the FCC granted the conditional waiver to LightSquared to build a terrestrial-only LTE network, Seybold said.

“It was all about jobs and money; it was never about technology,” he said. “The technology never reared its head, until they got permission. Then, people woke up and said, ‘Holy [expletive].’

“I don’t want to see a Nextel thing happen but even on a bigger scale — and that’s what’s going to happen, in my estimation. This is Nextel times 10.”

During the Nextel debate, the chief engineer for the FCC was Ed Thomas. He also finds some similarities between the Nextel situation a decade ago and the current LightSquared-GPS debate, but for different reasons.

In both cases, powerful mission-critical government users — public safety in the Nextel case, and the military in the LightSquared episode — have employed “scare tactics motivated by vested interest” to achieve a desired regulatory outcome, Thomas said.

“Frankly, in my judgment, [Nextel interference with LMR] wasn’t a significant problem,” Thomas said, noting that there were alternative solutions to the chosen spectrum swap and that — despite the fact that 800 MHz rebanding is still not complete a decade after the issue was identified — no public-safety agencies ever have attributed any fatalities or injuries to the matter.

Seybold disagreed with Thomas’ assessment of the 800 MHz interference situation.

“If he didn’t believe the Nextel interference was a big deal, I would have to say he missed that one completely,” Seybold said. “What does that say for his judgment about this one [regarding LightSquared and GPS]?”

Thomas also drew a parallel to another heated regulatory proceeding, this one involving ultrawideband, a promising technology that has not gained the commercial traction that many industry analysts anticipated because of rules implemented largely to protect GPS operations.

“When I was a chief engineer at the FCC, we were introducing ultrawideband,” Thomas said. “The GPS community did exactly what’s going on here. They misrepresented everything; I was accused in the press of causing airplanes to crash and on and on.

“[The] religion in the GPS community is, ‘You don’t do anything next to me.’ Now, I don’t know the reasons, but … you can go back and pull the clippings, and you can see it was very ugly.”