By Chris Imlay, SBE General Counsel
For those SBE members whose work involves television ENG, you need to read this, right now. There are ongoing, fast-moving negotiations among SBE, NAB, the Department of Defense, and NTIA that will likely have a profound effect on broadcasters’ use of the 2 GHz BAS band in the very near future. None of the following information will be a surprise to regular readers of the SBE Signal, but recent negotiations necessitate this update. The bottom line is that it is quite possible that broadcasters will, within the next year or so, have new sharing partners in the entirety of the 2025-2110 MHz band in the form of United States government terrestrial and aeronautical mobile facilities which will during that time have been displaced from the 1755-1780 MHz band (so that band can be auctioned for mobile broadband purposes).
The challenges in such sharing, however, are many and they are substantial. The first is to determine whether the types of government facilities, the density of them, the geographic distribution of them, and their technical operating parameters are fundamentally compatible with 2 GHz BAS operation. The second is to determine how the two types of uses can be coordinated through SBE’s frequency coordination program and the burden of that on SBE volunteers. The third is to determine the priority of access to the 2025-2110 MHz band as between government facilities and BAS and to determine how to avoid or resolve conflicts where real-time ENG needs conflict with critical national defense operations in the same geographic areas. Finally, fourth, it is important to assess the potential sharing arrangements in the face of future (perhaps near future) threats of reallocation of parts or the entire 2 GHz band for broadband purposes.
Continue reading the remainder of this memo on 2 GHz band sharing by Chris Imlay.
CALL TO ACTION: We urge you to inform your station management and news directors of this development and the ramifications it could have on news reporting and other programming. If you have comments or suggestions you wish to make to SBE leadership, you are welcome to send them to the chairman of the SBE Government Relations Committee, Ched Keiler at grc@sbe.org.
