Communications Insights: Trends and Cool Stuff

In a previous Cool Stuff, I wrote about the study which I completed demonstrating the social value from reallocating some of the Digital Dividend spectrum for broadband mission critical public safety communications. The European Parliament seems to agree.

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Industry Committee adopted a report urging that the EU should ensure a set of harmonized, EU-wide rules on how to allocate radio frequencies that will be freed up when analog terrestrial television broadcasting ends in 2012. The report was an own-initiative report authored by Italian liberal MEP, Patrizia Toia and was adopted in Committee with 41 votes in favor, 1 against, and 1 abstention. A plenary vote is scheduled for September. Further, the amendments to the report argue that approximately 100 MHz of the Digital Dividend could be reallocated to mobile broadband and other services such as public safety services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and road safety applications, without preventing broadcasting services from flourishing.

Insight:  While the transition from analog to digital terrestrial television should be complete in Europe by the end of 2012 (nearly 4 years after the U.S. is scheduled to complete its transition), decisions on how to reallocate the approximately 75% of the highest quality spectrum which will be released cannot come fast enough. Mission critical broadband communications networks require long lead-times to plan and deploy, and the services they enable are nothing short of lifesaving.  Public safety and security users urgently need an additional allocation of a approximately 30 MHz for these purposes.  The Industry Committee correctly urges Member States to release their Digital Dividend spectrum as quickly as possible, follow a common methodology, and develop national Digital Dividend strategies by the end of 2009.

My report on Public Safety and Security spectrum use in Europe publishes today. In the report, we marshal the policy and technological arguments for a reallocation of further dedicated spectrum for mission critical PSS communication from the transition to digital terrestrial television, the so called Digital Dividend. The website for the study is: http://www.public-safety-first.eu/. For the first time since I served on the FCC’s Hurricane Katrina response team, I have felt that my work has served a critical societal need. Yet, as an American who is used to being constantly bombarded with the need for homeland security, it was a bit surprising to me that PSS communications has received little attention in the discussion regarding how to redistribute this radio spectrum. So, it has been personally rewarding to influence the debate in at least some small way.

Insight: PSS service responders provide us with indispensable police, fire and other emergency services and the provision of emergency services extends beyond the social contract and invokes a moral obligation to protect life, welfare, and property. In order to enable the necessary broadband communications for next generation PSS communications, they will require two additional 15 MHz-wide blocks in the Digital Dividend bands. This allocation is on par with the 24 MHz which the US is reallocating from its DTV transition. A reallocation to PSS use cannot come soon enough since it may take more than ten years, to plan and deploy these networks.