[TWIAR] Nextel Signals Are Jamming Police Communications

[Greg Williams]

Nextel Signals Are Jamming Up Police Officers' Communications

By JESSE DRUCKER
Dow Jones Newswires

06/11/02


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.



George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923  Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes@uh.edu or antunes@pdq.net

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