Broadband Plan Offers Small Broadcasters Opportunities, Levin Says

LAS VEGAS -- A week after the FCC released the National Broadband Plan, unjustified “panic” remains among broadcasters about the proposals to ask some to free up TV spectrum for wireless broadband, Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative, said at the CTIA conference. For small broadcasters, in particular, the plan offers opportunity, he said.

"The broadcasters are all over the Hill and they're doing a very, very good job convincing people to oppose legislation that we're not proposing,” Levin said. “I keep hearing from rural congressmen that our plan would cause their two TV stations someplace in rural America to go dark. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but we're talking about a relatively small number of stations in a relatively small number of cities. … I keep hearing people need all 19.7 million bytes per second to do the best high-definition signal for the Super Bowl. I don’t know that much about television, but I know enough to know that only one station in a city carries the Super Bowl."

The FCC will provide additional information that should relieve any sense of panic, Levin said. “It does take time for these things to work out,” he said. “The planning hopefully will make some things clearer. There will be some additional papers that will do that. We're trying to work toward that voluntary solution. We're trying to work toward a win-win solution.” The FCC is not trying to eliminate over-the-air TV, Levin stressed. “If you actually know about the economics of the 25th broadcaster in New York or the 32nd broadcaster in Los Angles … it should be more appropriately seen as, we are helping to give them a cash infusion which they need. They are over-invested in spectrum and they're under-invested in cash. Anyone on Wall Street would say that."

Different broadcasters should view a proposed auction of broadcast spectrum differently, Levin said. “There is a big difference in market value between, say, the ABC affiliate in New York City and the number 25 station.” He added, “You know which one you would rather own, right? The value of their spectrum, however, is the same. They will have a very different point of view about the value of an incentive auction."

Levin, the FCC chief of staff during the early follow-through on the 1996 Telecom Act, said a lesson from that period is the importance of making spectrum available for future uses that are unclear when it is set aside. “It may be that the most significant thing we did was to take the digital television transition from a 30-year soft” deadline to a 10-year hard deadline, he said. “If we hadn’t done that, where would the 4G spectrum come from?"

In the follow-up to the plan, “we need to be able to move spectrum to higher purposes for reasons we cannot conceive of today,” Levin said. “We need markets to send signals about that reallocation process.” The future is unclear “so that’s why you need a lot more spectrum,” he said. “You need it for the licensed, but you always need it for unlicensed. One of the things we called for was an … unlicensed band -- not because anyone here knows what you're going to do with it, but because we have to make sure there is headroom for technology to emerge.” The broadband team discussed a new 20 MHz unlicensed band, but no decision has been made on how much spectrum should be allocated, Levin said.

Notwithstanding objections raised by broadcasters, public safety officials and others, the broadband plan is balanced, Levin said. “Our aspiration was that everybody should love about 80 percent, be indifferent to 10 percent and totally hate 10 percent,” he said. “If you look at the universal service” proposal, “it really is balanced and we are really trying to have every sector share a little bit of pain for the greater gain."

Levin said the broadband plan tried where possible to identify changes that the FCC can make without congressional action. But the commission needs Congress to give it “better tools,” so it can hold incentive auctions, and to create a way to fund a national wireless network for public safety. “That’s a relatively focused, targeted congressional agenda,” he said. “We have been talking with folks on the Hill all throughout on these things.”