TIA In the News
TIA Opposes Revival of Spectrum Cap
December 2, 2008
Communications Daily
The TIA opposed revival of a spectrum cap and asked the FCC to dismiss the Rural Telecommunications Group’s proposal to impose a 110 MHz limit county-by-country on all commercial terrestrial wireless spectrum below 2.3 GHz. The association said reinstating spectrum caps would reverse the FCC’s spectrum policies and harm the mobile and wireless broadband product market. The action also could limit carriers’ flexibility to respond to technical evolutions and to maximize the use of allocations, it said. The FCC should acknowledge in any future policy that innovative wireless broadband networks will be built on spectrum blocks of 1.25 MHz and more, said Danielle Coffey, TIA vice president for government affairs. The networks shouldn’t be regulated with “an antiquated spectrum cap policy that disregards” the spectrum needed for wireless broadband deployment, she said. The FCC should adopt spectrum policies ensuring that wireless carriers can adapt their spectrum to broadband use, she said. The Rural Telecommunications Group attempts to revive “a failed, arbitrary and innovation-stifling spectrum cap that has been discarded by the Commission,” Coffey said. The FCC has replaced the “arcane policy” with a flexible spectrum screen method to review competition by market, and the RTG hasn’t shown that a reversal of the policy is needed to protect consumers or that the discarded policy is any more workable than before it was discarded in 2003, she said.
Reprinted by permission from Communications Daily
Value of Membership
Learn how TIA helps you grow your business!