In March 2008, the Federal Communications Commission auctioned licenses to sizeable tracts of radio frequency spectrum that will be vacated due to the analog-to-digital television conversion to occur in June 2009. The Commission conditioned the license to one portion of this spectrum\u2014the \u201cD Block\u201d\u2014on an unprecedented requirement: for the licensee to work hand-in-hand with public-safety agencies in a \u201cpublic\/private partnership\u201d to deploy a nationwide public-safety communications network. At auction, the D Block garnered only minimal interest from prospective bidders and missed its reserve price by a wide margin. This failure drew the ire of policymakers, the telecommunications industry, and the public-safety community alike. The Commission subsequently reviewed its options but ultimately decided to reauction the D Block with a modified public\/private partnership requirement designed to entice more bidders. Nevertheless, in pursuing this goal, the Commission should refuse to lower D Block network performance requirements and should ensure that the public-safety community gets the earliest and most complete access to a deployed D Block network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In March 2008, the Federal Communications Commission auctioned licenses to sizeable tracts of radio frequency spectrum that will be vacated due to the analog-to-digital television conversion to occur in June 2009. The Commission conditioned the license to one portion of this spectrum\u2014the \u201cD Block\u201d\u2014on an unprecedented requirement: for the licensee to work hand-in-hand with public-safety …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,21,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7847,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/7847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}