T BAND CONTROVSARY

[brey1234]

A just-issued report by a public safety communications group says a Congressional mandate for emergency agencies to vacate the UHF television band (T-Band) is too expensive, would disrupt vital communications and leave users with no alternative spectrum. In short, the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) said the bill’s requirements are “not feasible,” and asked Congress to re-visit the issue of managing the T-Band spectrum. The bill was passed in Feb. 2012 as part of a package that also granted spectrum to public safety for creation of a nationwide broadband wireless network. Politically, the T-Band provisions were considered to be a “give-up,” used in exchange for the broadband spectrum. However, the provisions were immediately criticized by agencies in the 11 metro areas where the T-Band is authorized for public safety operations. In some cases, agencies have made very recent investments in radio infrastructure to support their T-Band systems, only to learn they must vacate the band. In their 69-page analysis, the NPSTC said there is insufficient alternate spectrum in the affected regions for the 925 licensed T-Band agencies, and that it could cost up to $9.5 billion to migrate them to other spectrum. An auction of the vacated spectrum to commercial users is, “unlikely to produce the auction revenues needed for public safety relocation,” the group said. The report includes the results of a T-Band user survey, which shows that 62 percent of users picked the T-Band because no other spectrum was available, and that 95 percent of agencies use the spectrum for their primary voice communications. Download (pdf) the report for all the details

 

[FFPM571]

Its Controversy by the way.. Old news..This happened over a year ago.. Been discussed many times here..

http://forums.radioreference.com/vi...um/253537-t-band-licensees-days-numbered.html

http://forums.radioreference.com/in...congress-may-have-revisit-t-band-mandate.html

http://forums.radioreference.com/ge...on/234029-t-band-sacrificed-d-block-deal.html

 

[nd5y]

NPSTC's T-band report was just published on 3/15/2013.
This is probably what the OP was trying to post.
http://www.npstc.org/download.jsp?tableId=37&column=217&id=2678&file=T_Band_Report_20130315.pdf

 

[mmckenna]

Not at all surprising, the industry has been saying this since last February. Glad someone finally put it into writing and gave it to congress.
The issue is that Congress didn't base any of their decision on reality. There were those that wanted the 700MHz band to be fully auctioned off to cellular and internet carriers so the FCC could hold another frequency auction. This would have created billions of dollars in revenue to the federal government. The congress came up with this uneducated decision as a way to appease both sides of congress, those that wanted the blocks for public safety, and those that wanted to auction off the spectrum.
Now the trick will be if our Congress can get it through their impossibly thick skulls to revisit this issue and base their decision off reality rather than greed.

On the other hand, the broadband LTE systems for public safety are a dubious solution to an issue that isn't necessarily there. They've already stated that they won't be able to do handset to handset voice communications until at least 2020, maybe later. So, this slice of broadband is going to be an overblown system that is going to cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and public safety is still going to need their current radio systems to do their job. Broadband for public safety is an interesting idea and certainly has its possibilities, but there are other ways to do this.