Ten years later, 800 MHz rebanding proves to be an enlightening exercise

Despite this, I believe the 800 MHz project has been worthwhile, for several reasons:

• Rebanding gave federal policymakers—and even those in the industry—a glimpse into the communications systems used by first responders in an unprecedented manner.  Prior to rebanding, I’m not sure policymakers fully understood what mission-critical communications—systems that must work at all times, even during transitions as complex as rebanding—really meant, but many learned while hearing stories during both the negotiation and execution phases.
• Thanks to rebanding—and narrowbanding of systems below 470 MHz—policymakers have a relatively accurate snapshot of what domestic public-safety communications systems exist today. In contrast, when rebanding began, stories  of the FCC’s inability to contact the listed licensees for many systems (often, that person no longer worked for the entity in question) were rather disconcerting, as were stories that many licenses for systems had not been updated properly.
• Establishing contiguous spectrum in the 800 MHz band should be beneficial in a broadband world. Thanks to rebanding, Sprint has contiguous spectrum at both 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz that makes it a much more formidable player in the wireless-carrier arena. Meanwhile, public safety is using its contiguous 700 MHz and 800 MHz spectrum for narrowband LMR operations and will continue to do so for years to come. However, the potential exists for public safety to combine these spectrum swaths with its 700 MHz broadband spectrum—something that can be done today via carrier aggregation—to eventually give first responders a massive broadband spectral platform for the long term in the 700/800 MHz range, if a transition to broadband technologies is made.

There have been other benefits, including some jurisdictions using rebanding funds from Sprint Nextel to substantially pay for new systems that may not have been possible financially, if only local taxpayer revenues were used. And, in a large number of cases, spectrally separating the commercial cellular networks from public-safety LMR systems did resolve the interference problems.

Finally, from a personal standpoint, rebanding turned out a great way for a journalist who was a newbie to public-safety communications to learn a lot about this intriguing community really fast.