pdvWireless acquires, swaps 900 MHz spectrum while awaiting FCC ruling on LMR-to-broadband proposal

“It’s math. If you have 399 channels [in the 900 MHz swath], and we want 240, then any incumbent that wants to stay at 900 MHz has to fit into those remaining channels,” O’Brien said. “It’s a question of: What does the deployment look like? Is it necessary to buy new equipment? Is it necessary to put in secondary antenna locations?

“We’ve had a number of experts helping us look at this, and I would say that … we don’t see any market where we can’t address our comparable-facilities responsibility and make available a retuned system that works as well or better than it did before the channels were swapped from upper to somewhat lower.”

O’Brien repeatedly noted that pdvWireless would be responsible for paying costs associated with providing narrowband incumbents with “comparable facilities” after relocating their systems. Exactly what this means is a primary concern for incumbents, according to Brett Kilbourne, vice president and deputy general counsel for the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC).

“We still have to make sure that the incumbents are made whole—that’s key, and it’s a little different from ‘comparable facilities,’” Kilbourne said during the session. “’Made whole’ [means incumbents are] no worse off than they were before. ‘Comparable facilities’ could be something short of that … There’s still a lot of question marks about how that is going to play out.”

One key issue is that relocating all narrowband activity to the lower 2×2 MHz of the 900 MHz band could create interference issues for combiners for some incumbent systems. If the combiners cannot be redeployed effectively in this space, then an incumbent licensee would have to build more sites, Kilbourne said.

O’Brien and pdvWireless officials have long acknowledged this issue, even contemplating a small shift of the proposed broadband block of spectrum to a lower part of the band, so the uppermost portions of the band could house combiners with proper spectral spacing. However, this idea was nixed, because such a move would impact six nationwide railroad channels, O’Brien said.

In addition, O’Brien said that there are relatively few instances in which the combiner issue would create a situation that would require additional sites would need to be added—and pdvWireless would have to pay for them, if that is the case.

“There are you-can-almost-count-them-on-one-hand instances of that, where you’d have to think about additional measures to make up for lost coverage,” O’Brien said. “But the normal is that we’re not in a situation where you’d be losing coverage—or it wouldn’t be comparable. How could you argue that it was?”