DTV Delay Can’t Deter Verizon, White Spaces Fans

DTV and White Spaces

As the Federal Communications Commission scrambles to cope with first major wave of the digital-television transition, wireless providers and other tech firms are plowing ahead with their ambitious plans for the analog spectrum that will be vacated once the switchover is completed.

That’s in spite of the fact that the spectrum won’t be available for commercial use until June 12, thanks to a recent act of Congress that delayed the deadline for TV stations to vacate the airwaves, though some 421 television stations still went ahead and shut off their analog signals yesterday.

Chief among those pressing onward is Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), and the company with the most skin in the spectrum game. This morning at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company gave the world its first glimpse of its plans to upgrade to a much-anticipated 4G wireless broadband network using the soon-to-be vacated spectrum.

But companies pushing for the government to open up the buffer zones between TV stations, known as white spaces, are also not backing down in their efforts. Since the FCC concluded its auction of the 700MHz spectrum freed up by the DTV transition, a number of tech firms have thrown their weight behind white spaces — including players like Google, who failed to win a chunk of the 700MHz airwaves.

The news comes as industry players and federal regulators continue wrestling with how to wring advanced new services from television spectrum, a quandary that gained a new wrinkle with the DTV delay. With analog broadcasts on their way out thanks to the digital switchover, the vacated spectrum has been earmarked for a host of new uses, but the government-mandated delay isn’t hitting all the players equally.

The push for postponing the DTV transition started to gather steam early this year, after it became clear that millions of Americans were unprepared for the switchover and would lose their signals if broadcasters held to the original date of Feb. 17. President Obama and a substantial majority of lawmakers called for the delay to buy the government more time to educate consumers about the transition and clear the backlog in the program to distribute coupons for the converter boxes needed to keep older sets working.

Verizon, along with AT&T (NYSE: T), the other big winner in last year’s spectrum auction, supported a one-time delay, provided that the new date would be set in stone, as key members of Congress promised it would be.

Who got stung?

One player that had been vigorously opposed to the DTV delay was Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM). The company best known as a chipset maker for mobile devices has been pushing MediaFLO, a service that delivers live TV to a cell phone — and has had its eyes set on a launch in connection with the original DTV transition date.

In January, Qualcomm announced an ambitious roll-out schedule for MediaFLO with plans to make the service available to 200 million consumers in 100 markets across the country. At the time, the company said the market launch would “commence within weeks of the Feb. 17, 2009 digital television (DTV) transition date and continue throughout the year.”

[cob:Special_Report]Qualcomm was also a heavy bidder in last year’s auction, snapping up spectrum in the so-called E block that is conducive to mobile video services.

Qualcomm did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but the company’s opposition to the DTV delay has been well documented.

Following the House passage of the DTV delay bill, Stifel Nicolaus telecom analyst Rebecca Arbogast noted that “the fallout on industry appears to be limited, with the exception of Qualcomm, which is anxious to use the spectrum for its MediaFLO service.”

Page 2: Verizon’s gambit

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Verizon’s gambit

Verizon, on the other hand, remains deterred by the postponed DTV transition. The largest U.S. wireless carrier confirmed that the delay hasn’t put a serious dent in its planned launch of a 4G network using the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard.

The new network will make use of the nearly $10 billion of 700MHz analog spectrum it purchased at the FCC’s auction last March.

During a keynote presentation at Mobile World Congress today, Verizon CTO Dick Lynch gave a rough timetable for the build-out and highlighted several vendors the company will work with in the process.

In spite of the four-month setback due to the DTV delay, Verizon is planning its commercial launch sometime next year. The company has been conducting field trials for its 4G network in a handful of U.S. markets — in Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and northern New Jersey; as well as in Budapest, Dusseldorf and Madrid in Europe.

The company also said it plans to broaden the testing once the 700MHz spectrum becomes available in June.

A Verizon spokeswoman said the company has not yet settled on a precise launch date, but said that more details would be available in coming weeks.

“We were planning an aggressive deployment schedule [before the delay], and we’re planning an aggressive deployment schedule now,” she told InternetNews.com.

Verizon today also named Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as its primary network vendors. It will also tap Nokia Siemens Networks and Starent Networks to handle some technological components of the new network.

Whither white spaces?

The 700MHz spectrum wasn’t the only chunk of airwaves the DTV transition put into play.

Shortly after the auction concluded, major tech companies, industry groups and nonprofit organizations began a full-court press calling for white spaces to be made available for unlicensed wireless networks following the transition.

With a unanimous FCC vote in November, the white-space groups carried the day, defeating the powerful broadcasters’ lobby, which claimed that the devices would interfere with television signals, going so far as to warn that white-space devices could ruin the DTV transition.

With many details still up in the air about how the spectrum will be used, pushing the DTV switchover back seems likely to have little impact on when white-space devices could come to market.

“I don’t foresee it being a snag at all,” Jake Ward, a spokesman for the Wireless Innovation Alliance, an industry group that lobbied to open the spectrum, told InternetNews.com. “I don’t believe that any of the companies involved had targeted a launch date prior to June 12.”

Ward said that some companies remain hopeful that devices could hit the market by the end of the year, but added that that timetable might be optimistic.

The FCC’s rules for white-space devices included several provisions for guarding against interference with TV broadcasts. Those safeguards, which were published in the Federal Register yesterday, go too far for some of the companies lobbying to free the spectrum.

“We hope to get some changes made to the rules,” Stu Overby, Motorola’s senior director of global spectrum strategy, told InternetNews.com.

Upon publication of the rules in the Federal Register, interested parties have 30 days to submit comments for the FCC to review.

“We don’t believe that we would be the only ones asking for changes,” Overby said, taking issue with the FCC’s requirements concerning antenna sizes and power limits.

Page 3: Who else might join in?

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Motorola recently joined with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and several other companies to begin work on a nationwide database to keep track of vacant spectrum. Since broadcasters use different channels in different markets, one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval was that white-spaces devices contain geolocation technology to prevent them from wandering into occupied spectrum.

The companies are not committing to maintain and operate the database, and it is possible that the FCC could rely on multiple databases to guard against interference.

In addition to the final rulemaking and completion of the database effort, all white-spaces devices would need to receive certification from the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology.

Champions of the white-space spectrum view it as an innovative path to low-cost Internet access for areas currently only served by dial-up.

“We and a number of companies are looking at TV white spaces as a spectrum solution for rural broadband,” Overby said.



Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is also exploring white-spaces networks for factories and other industrial settings.



But with all the obstacles that remain, Rick Rotondo, cofounder of the spectrum marketplace Spectrum Bridge, isn’t holding his breath for the white-space revolution.



“At the earliest, it will be the end of the year when we begin to see some products,” Rotondo told InternetNews.com. “But most likely, we won’t see a lot of devices for 18 to 24 months from now.”

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