Revisit Receiver Performance Standards, Ex-Chief Engineer Urges FCC

Receiver performance standards will become an increasingly significant issue as the FCC looks at how to make more efficient use of the spectrum, unless industry steps forward to make receivers work better, former FCC and NTIA official Dale Hatfield said Tuesday at the Catholic University of America’s communications symposium. Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said the FCC continues to look closely at questions about receiver performance.

"If we don’t do a better job on receivers going forward we've got real problems,” said Hatfield, former acting NTIA administrator and chief engineer at the FCC. “We need to figure out, even if it’s voluntary, some way to stop receivers out there from consuming” so much spectrum.

The FCC examined receiver standards in a notice of inquiry launched in March of 2003, which asked whether the agency should encourage or mandate receiver performance requirements. That proceeding, recommended by the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force, was later formally terminated by the commission “without prejudice."

As the FCC considers making more spectrum available for wireless broadband “you have to look at all of the elements,” Knapp said. “Certainly, you don’t want to convey that we're eager to regulate. … As we go forward, trying to squeeze more and more out of the spectrum, it’s an issue that we have to address.”

Knapp told us the FCC’s Technology Advisory Council will look more closely at the issue. “I don’t know what the next steps might be,” he said. “It’s something that we have to consider as we're trying to get more access to the spectrum.” Regulators can’t focus just on whether a band is being used but need to ask what would be the impact of putting new services in a band, he said: “To do that you have to consider the receiver characteristics in the adjacent bands."

Hatfield said isolating interference is getting more difficult. “The digital signals tend to be more noise-like,” he said. “They accumulate. When the interferer is operating at higher power they sort of pop up and you can find them, you can have a thousand devices out there each causing a small amount of interference.” That can be the spectrum equivalent of “death by a thousand cuts,” he said.

"There’s been questions about the commission’s jurisdiction on receivers so that’s sort of a threshold issue,” Hatfield said in an interview. “To me, there’s a time for things” and the FCC’s LightSquared proceeding on GPS interference protection is making receiver questions more relevant, he said. “Part of the question is what is the quality of receivers used in GPS,” he said.

During a second wireless panel at the conference, Verizon Wireless Vice President Charla Rath warned that there’s little spectrum that can easily be reallocated for wireless broadband by the FCC. “The image of low hanging fruit is you can just reach up and pluck it,” Rath said. “We're beyond the low hanging fruit stage at least when it comes to things that are of concern to my company.” Every band will require lots of work, she said. Rath noted that before the first FCC auction, some claimed auctions would never work. “At the time, what the commission was proposing to do was the single most complicated auction that had ever been attempted,” she said. “It’s not easy, but we've done it before.”

"Being able to close out the white spaces proceeding would be hugely helpful” said Paula Boyd, Microsoft regulatory counsel.

Derek Khlopin, head of government affairs, U.S., at Nokia Siemens, said the FCC should be able to act quickly on the 700 MHz D-block. “It’s sitting there,” he said. “Similarly, I think with the AWS 3 spectrum you have it available.”

Panelists agreed that legislation before the House and Senate mandating a federal spectrum inventory could prove helpful. “It’s not something we should be waiting for,” said Allison Remsen, executive director of Mobile Future. “Needs are pressing now. … While it'll be a great source for longer term spectrum, it shouldn’t be something that precludes action in the short term.”

"Some advocates up on the Hill argue that we need to get an inventory done before we could, say, give the FCC incentive auction authority,” Khlopin said. “To me, that’s a real issue.” An inventory could be useful, Boyd said: “But … policymakers will have to make pretty hard decisions about technical rules, about which bands to pursue, those are still substantial decisions.”