Adrick Floats Regional Repack Transition Plan

An NAB-commissioned study says the post-incentive auction repack of the TV band could take up to 11 years, but that doesn’t mean that the wireless carriers that buy spectrum in the auction won’t be able to put it to work in some parts of the country long before that, according to one of the authors of the study.

The trick is to conduct the repack one region at a time, says Jay Adrick, an RF consultant who was part of the Digital Tech Consulting team that wrote the study. By doing so, he says, the limited resources needed for the repack could be focused on one region at a time and the wireless buyers could get access to their spectrum in the first of the regions in less than three years.

“There needs to be some orchestrated and managed approach to the repack rather than just firing the starter’s pistol and [letting] the fastest guy get the resources,” he says.

Following the incentive auction, in which the FCC will buy spectrum from willing broadcasters and then turn around and sell it to wireless carriers, the FCC needs to repack, or segregate, TV stations that remain in the band so they don’t interfere with the wireless buyers. That involves moving hundreds of stations to new channels, and the FCC is giving stations just 39 months to make their moves.

According to the DTC study, the FCC timetable is unrealistic, given the limited resources stations have to move to new channels. If the FCC buys 84 MHz of spectrum, 1,200 stations will have to move to new channels and that could take 11 years, it says. If the FCC buys 120 MHz, only 800 will have to move, it says. But, even then, moving will take eight years.

According to the study, demand from hundreds of stations from all over the country at the same time will quickly overwhelm the small community of RF consulting engineers, tower structural engineers, communications lawyers, antenna manufacturers, RF component manufacturers, transmitter manufacturers, RF transmission system installers and tower and antenna installers.

Given such limits, Adrick says, broadcasters have been talking up a regional approach. It involves segmenting the country into, say, six regions. Separated by distance and mountain ranges, RF signals in one region would not interfere with those in any of the others.

By tackling one region at a time, all available resources could be dedicated to that region. The repack could then be done in an orderly fashion with the most populated region going first and the second most populated going second and so on down the line, Adrick says. “So, instead of 39 months, you could actually give the wireless industry New York [the Northeast] in 28 months or so.”

The least populated region may have to wait 10 years or more for repacking, Adrick says, but that may be acceptable because demand for wireless service is least there.

Adrick stressed that for the regional plan to have any chance of working, all parties need to buy into it from the start. “If all the resources have been deployed in sort of a helter-skelter manner, going back and trying to put some order to this after the fact is not going to bring the thing in nearly as quickly as it would if we put some order to it upfront.”

Adrick declined to say whether the plan has been pitched to wireless carriers or the FCC.

In a letter to the FCC this week arguing that the current 39-month deadline is unrealistic, NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan mentioned that the FCC “should work with stakeholders to develop a regional transition plan that will allow for the most expeditious, efficient repack possible.”

An NAB rep declined to elaborate on the “regional transition plan” or even to confirm that it is the same one Adrick is talking about.