Does it really take 13 years to get access to spectrum?

According to the organisation, which represents the country’s mobile industry, the FCC must urgently focus its attention on this because it takes an average of 13 years to reallocate spectrum – from the “first step” to the “first deployment”.

One might want to take issue with the 350 MHz figure, which is based on a recent report by the Brattle Group that the CTIA itself commissioned. The true extent of the spectrum crunch is a debate we have been consistently tracking and is explored in depth in our forthcoming book, Understanding Spectrum Liberalization.

The 13 years figure is also debatable. When does a reallocation process start exactly, and when does it finish? For the AWS-3 band, whose auction concluded earlier this year, the starting point could be as early as the NTIA’s discussion of its refarming in a 2001 report. This led to the band being cited in an FCC Order in 2002.

Eight years later, it was mentioned in the National Broadband Plan, which led to its inclusion in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. The auction process itself began in 2014, and was concluded earlier this year. The band is expected to be used from 2017 onwards.

In this case, the CTIA takes the first step as being the FCC’s 2002 Order and the last step as the predicted 2017 deployment – a total of 15 years. Preparations for the auction were undoubtedly complicated, and compounded by the fact that 17 government agencies used the band. Nevertheless, there is a valid argument that says these preparations only started in earnest after 2012 – and that they finished with the auction’s conclusion in 2015.

“Begin at the beginning,” says the king in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop”. If only reallocating spectrum was that simple.

Toby Youell, PolicyTracker

23/7/2015