[Scan-DC] THE WALL STREET JOURNAL- Nextel Signals Are Jamming Up Police Officers' Communications

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TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Nextel Signals Are Jamming Up Police Officers' Communications

By JESSE DRUCKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Last summer, police officers in Newport News, Va. started to notice a
vexing problem.

Whenever they drove within a half mile of one of the city's main
intersections, the mobile computers in their cruisers inexplicably
stopped
working.

It took a few weeks and several field tests before city technicians
determined the cause: a nearby cellular site transmitting calls for
Nextel
Communications Inc. Signals from the country's fifth-biggest wireless
provider were jamming the officers' communications. The company soon
fixed the problem, but the difficulties didn't begin or end with Newport

News. Calls by cellphone users, mostly Nextel subscribers, are
interfering daily with the mobile communications of police departments
and other public-safety agencies around the country. So far, more than
70 agencies in 27 states have reported problems.

The Federal Communications Commission is weighing several complex
proposals to clear up the interference. But if only a solution were so
simple: Practically all of the proposed fixes before the FCC threaten to

create a logistical nightmare for more than 5,000 public-safety agencies

and businesses that use private wireless networks, including such
companies as UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and Adolph Coors Co.'s
Coors Brewing unit.

The potential cost of moving everybody around? As much as $4 billion,
according to an estimate by Motorola Inc. Meanwhile, Nextel's rival
cellular providers say Nextel's proposed solution would give it a
windfall
of much sought-after wireless capacity at minimal cost.

While the FCC has relocated radiowave users before, the agency rarely
has attempted something this far-reaching, some experts say. "It's a
combination of the sheer number of users, the sheer number of licensees,

and the fact that we're talking about a very important piece of the
band,"
says Robert Schwaninger, an attorney who represents Small Business in
Telecommunications. "You rarely see a rulemaking where almost every
segment of the telecommunications industry steps in because they can
see where their particular ox may be gored."

The troubles flow from the arcane world of radio spectrum, the
collection
of radiowaves that transmit wireless communications. Nextel built its
business in the 1980s by acquiring scattered spectrum used by truck
drivers, construction workers and other industries. However, the
slapdash allocation of spectrum through the years means Nextel's
spectrum is interleaved with slices of spectrum used by public-safety
agencies and other companies. Because of the close proximity of the
spectrum slices, public-safety radios can pick up signals from other
users,
creating interference.

In November, Nextel filed with the FCC a proposal to alleviate the
interference by grouping those slices into larger, separate chunks.
Better
yet, according to the company, the changes would actually give public
safety more capacity, as well as $500 million from Nextel to help pay
for
the changes. But the proposal would shift corporate users out of the 800

MHz band entirely (or give them secondary status), requiring them to
spend money to upgrade their equipment, or buy new equipment
altogether. Nextel offers no money to the corporations to help pay for
the
moves.

FedEx Corp. has told the FCC that Nextel's plan would force it to spend
more than $100 million to reconfigure the wireless system supporting its

mobile package-tracking system.

Nextel's plan would also give the Reston, Va., company more contiguous
spectrum, which means more potential data capability than what it has
now. That has its cellular rivals up in arms. "To give Nextel 16 MHz of
entirely free clear spectrum, without in any way paying for that
spectrum, would be a windfall to Nextel, and is not something the
commission should do or has the legal authority to do," says John T.
Scott, Verizon Wireless's deputy general counsel for regulatory law.

Indeed, a coalition of Nextel's rivals, including Cingular Wireless and
AT&T Wireless Services Inc., propose moving public-safety users to the
700 MHz band, auctioning off the
800 MHz spectrum, and then giving the proceeds to public-safety users to
offset relocation costs. The 700
MHz band, however, raises its own issues because several television
broadcasters occupy it.

For Nextel, the stakes are high: Its proposal would make it much easier
to upgrade to a more widely used
technology for higher-speed data transmission, analysts say. "If Nextel
could get this through and pay $1
billion, I think it's a really great deal for them," says Blair Levin,
an analyst at Legg Mason and a former
FCC official. "They'd get their spectrum situation cleaned up, they
become much more attractive as an
acquisition target and they can run their networks much more
efficiently."

For its part, Nextel says the company gets no net gain in spectrum, and
it is proposing the only viable
solution to the problem. "This isn't something where somebody's at
fault," says Morgan O'Brien, Nextel's
vice-chairman and one of several former FCC officials at the company.
"This is a natural byproduct, if
anything, of a 40-year-old allocation scheme which meets up with new
technology."

The company's rivals also suspect a hidden agenda in the proposal: Under
its terms, Nextel would get a
chunk of spectrum possibly overlapping spectrum controlled by a
satellite company whose single largest
shareholder is Nextel board member Craig O. McCaw. The satellite
company, New ICO Global
Communications Ltd., is seeking FCC approval to use the spectrum for
land-based mobile-phone service.
However spokesmen for both Nextel and ICO Global Communications say the
proposals have nothing to
do with each other.

--Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.