The symptoms were easy to describe: commercial wireless signals were bleeding into public safety radio systems. The prescription, ordered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2004, was to reconfigure the 800 megahertz (MHz) band that was being contorted. The fly in the ointment — the plan's three-year timetable, which ends next month — has proven to be gravely miscalculated because of massive misjudgments on the project's key aspects. As a result, the very little progress that has been made to date has placed the reconfiguration and its participants in jeopardy.

In fact, more than 40 percent of the 900 public safety licensees that need to be rebanded have yet to sign a contract, according to a report to the FCC in April from Sprint Nextel, the company responsible for the rebanding project. Less than 20 percent of the 900 licensees have a scheduled date for completing their work, and 300 of the public safety licensees that originally were scheduled to finish rebanding several months ago will not finish by the June 27 deadline. Even worse, “nearly half of those licensees have not completed their planning or are not yet in a position to even begin to negotiate their [rebanding agreements],” the report said.

The notion that rebanding could be finished in three years and cost less than $2.8 billion now seems ludicrous, as the most optimistic projections are that the massive engineering project will not be completed until at least 2012 at a cost that could exceed original projections by billions of dollars. Meanwhile, as federal officials bemoan the lack of communications interoperability between the nation's first responders, Sprint Nextel is in court asking for more time, and public safety agencies are somehow muddling through.

Negotiation snags

The radio interference began when the FCC allowed Nextel Communications to operate on a spectrum that interleaved with the 800 MHz airwaves used most by the nation's largest public safety organizations. FCC's 2004 order to correct the problem required Nextel to fund all costs of reconfiguring the 800 MHz and portions of the 1.9 gigahertz (GHz) spectrum bands, in addition to contributing spectrum to public safety. In return, Nextel would receive 10 MHz of 1.9 GHz and contiguous spectrum. The FCC appointed a group, the Transition Administrator, to oversee the work and started the timer on the three-year project in 2005.

When the FCC passed the order, many public safety officials said there was too much work to be done and too few qualified people to do it so quickly. In fact, the time it has taken Sprint Nextel and public safety licensees to agree on rebanding deals has dramatically exceeded the original timetable.

There are a myriad of explanations for the slow pace. Public safety licensees have claimed Sprint Nextel has required an unusual amount of detail in the planning phases and regularly challenged cost estimates. Sprint Nextel claims that some public safety licensees are not questioning quotes from consultants and other vendors because the licensees are not paying for the work. And, both sides have voiced frustration about the inability of the FCC and the Transition Administrator to quickly rule on disputed points of negotiations.

Some of the problems can be traced to older 800 MHz public safety networks whose replacement parts for rebanding cannot be found. That has led to disagreements concerning the work that is needed to meet the FCC's standard that old equipment be replaced with “comparable facilities.” In addition, public safety radio systems can never be taken off the air while changes are made — an alternative that can be exercised with most commercial wireless networks to speed progress. “It's like trying to change the wings on a plane while it's in flight,” says Steve Proctor, executive director for the Utah Communications Agency Network.

While such disagreements and technical problems may justify blowing through the deadline, many third-party observers say that because such a large-scale rebanding of public safety systems is unprecedented, the agency did not know how to calculate the project's lifespan in the first place.