Chief Poarch to Come to FCC

On Friday, February 23, 2007 FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin announced "his intention to appoint" Derek Poarch, a North Carolina police chief, as the FCC’s first Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Chief. (Poarch is pronounced with a silent a as in front porch"

“Public safety is one of the Commission’s and my top priorities, and I am very pleased that Chief Poarch, who is a highly accomplished and nationally respected law enforcement officer, has agreed to head our bureau,” Chairman Martin said. The Commission announced in March 17, 2006 that it planned to create this bureau and it has been operational since September 26, 2006 under Acting Chief Ken Moran (whose appointment was never announced publicly).

Having an experienced public safety officer at senior FCC management should improve mutual understanding between the public safety community and FCC.

Chief Poarch assumed the position of Director of Public Safety at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on September 14, 1998. (Chairman Martin is a U.N.C. graduate and has served on the Board Of Trustees.) In this position Chief Poarch commands a department of approximately 300 full and part-time employees providing police, security, emergency communications, parking and transportation services to a university community of 40,000 persons having more than one million visitors each year.

Chief Poarch is a native of Lenoir, North Carolina and prior to becoming police chief at UNC, he worked 21 years at the Lenoir North Carolina Police Department. He began his career as a telecommunicator and ascended through the department ranks to become second in command of the department holding the rank of Major over department operations.

He is a 1979 graduate of Western Piedmont Community College in Morganton, North Carolina with an associates degree in Police Science; a 1981 graduate of Gardner-Webb University with a bachelors degree in Social Science with a concentration in criminal justice and a 1988 graduate of the University of South Carolina with a masters degree in criminal justice. The chief has attended numerous police management schools and graduated as a dean’s scholar from the Southern Police Institute at the University of Louisville in 1992.

Chief Poarch is a commissioner with the North Carolina Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission where he serves as Chair of the Education and Training Committee. He is the founding and past president of Lenoir Police Community Partners Inc., a non-profit corporation founded to provide financial support to communities in the City of Lenoir. In July 2003 he was elected President of the North Carolina Police Executives Association. Chief Poarch previously served on the United States Department of Justice National Community Oriented Policing Resource Board.

It struck me a little odd that the FCC Public Notice announcing Chief Poarch's appointment starts with the phrase "Today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin announced his intention to appoint Derek Poarch ..". The "intention to nominate" phrase is a White House phrase that has not been used at FCC for long. For example, he previously used it in a January 8, 2007 PN dealing with the appointments for new chiefs of IB and MB. On the other hand, a December 29, 2006 PN said,

Today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin named Fred Campbell as Chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Catherine Seidel as Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau.

although the corresponding headline of the FCC website said

Chairman Martin Announces the Chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau.

Going back to basics, Section 4(f)(1) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, states

The Commission shall have authority, subject to the provisions of the civil-service laws and chapter 51 and subchapter III of chapter 53 of title 5, to appoint such officers, engineers, accountants, attorneys, inspectors, examiners, and other employees as are necessary in the exercise of its functions. (emphasis added)

The Chairman has certain powers delegated to him under 47 CFR 0.3, but appointing bureau chiefs is not one of them. Now everyone knows that the Commission defers to the Chairman on such appointment unless the appointee is an ax murderer or has personally insulted a commissioner. But the legal authority rests with the Commission, not the Chairman.

Chairman Powell was more sensitive on this point, using the following words in a May 14, 2001 announcement,

FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell today announced the appointments of K. Dane Snowden as Chief of the Consumer Information Bureau; Martha Johnston as Director of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs; Jane Mago as the agency's General Counsel and John Rogovin Deputy General Counsel; and William Spencer Deputy Managing Director.

Chairman Powell did not claim to have made the appointment himself, he was just announcing them. Chairman Kinnard, on the other hand, used phraseology similar to Chairman Martin's when in announcing appointments one time.

A September 15, 1997 PN when Reed Hundt was chairman used the passive verb form to avoid the issue all together saying "Lawrence E. Strickling has been named Chairman of the Commission's Enforcement Task Force."

However, at the beginning of the Kinnard chairmanship, a PN announcing the new bureau chiefs began simply with "On November 6, 1997 the Commission announced the following personnel appointments:"

I assume the career civil servants in the Commission's Office of Media Relations understand these issues but were ignored by the political types on the 8th floor every time the wrong language was used in PNs. The irony is that the root cause of the worst public safety problem FCC has ever had, the 800 MHz Nextel mess, was probably the same thing: political appointees ignoring career staff's caution. (In that case dealing with the need for conditions on the Fleetcall waiver that was the origin of the problem.) But FCC has never done a postmortem on what went wrong and resulted in the Nextel problem. Chief Poarch, let me suggest this as a project for your new staff.

Welcome to FCC!

European Parliament Valentine's Day
Spectrum Present

For Valentine's Day, the European Parliament went to Strasbourg and approved a resolution on spectrum policy. (The European Parliament usually meets in Brussels but in one of the many compromises necessary to keep its members happy has a spare set of buildings in Strasbourg that it uses for occasional meetings.) Now Valentine's Day seems a tradition for spectrum decisions as some may recall that FCC made its UWB decision on the same date.

My friends at PolicyTracker summarized the resolution as "an endorsement of spectrum liberalisation which embraced technology and service neutrality, flexibility and a secondary market." The European broadcasting community was unhappy with such radical concepts and were finally "bought off" with the insertion of the following statement:

"(European Parliament) recognises spectrum efficiency as a common duty of Member States, national regulators and industry; insists on the necessity of securing the stability and continuity of the media services provided by broadcasters, but emphasises the importance of a level playing field for new entrants and for new technologies; believes that room for innovation must be guaranteed, in the interest of consumers, enterprises and employment generally; calls on the Commission to clarify the specific risks relating to interferences and conditions of applications of new rules in the new Member States and to propose adapted solutions; "[Emphasis added]

Now the European Parliament at present doesn't really have that much control over European spectrum policy which is generally made in the 47 nation CEPT, rather than the 27 nation European Union. So this resolution doesn't have any direct impact but is a sign of movement in Europe.

The resolution starts with an endless list of clauses beginning "with having regard to the ...". These are actually a good bibliography of European economic and spectrum policy background as most include links to the cited document.

Some of the liberal statements adopted in the resolution are:

8. Rejects a one-sided market model of spectrum management and urges the (European) Commission to reform the system of spectrum management in such a way as to facilitate the coexistence of different types of licensing models, i.e. traditional administration, use without numerical restrictions and new, market-based approaches; stresses that the aim must be to boost economic and technical efficiency as well as the usefulness to society of this valuable resource;

9. Emphasises, with regard to spectrum management, the general principles of technological neutrality together with service neutrality in order to promote competition and innovation, within the context of the Lisbon Strategy; points out that spectrum should be managed in a manner which is flexible and transparent ...

10. Emphasises the importance of technical neutrality to the promotion of innovation and interoperability and calls for a more flexible and transparent policy for the consideration of the public interest;

12. Welcomes the Commission's proposal to adopt differentiated spectrum management models including the unlicensed model which provides additional flexibility by allowing for free access within some technical limitations; considers that developing the right mix between the different types of licensing model will be important in achieving EU policy objectives;

14. Considers that the administrative method of allocating spectrum rights could be supplemented by Member States opening up more frequencies to unlicensed, and therefore possibly shared use, and by allowing spectrum trading on condition that this opening up does not harm the continuity and quality of services concerned with public information and safety; takes the view that the phenomenon and the standard conditions of spectrum trading should be clarified;

23. Welcomes the Commission's proposal to introduce a market-based approach to spectrum, and acknowledges that the traditional model will continue to be relevant, in particular where important public interests are at stake;

Now to us veterans of the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force these do not look like radical thoughts. And they sound like ideas that the UK's Ofcom has advocated for years. But for the rest of Europe this is a major step forward towards liberalization with ideas like spectrum markets and more unlicensed use. It may even have an impact in the ITU although I suspect most national ITU delegates may try to ignore it as much as possible.

[Photo from Wikipedia]

It might be nice to know where the current FCC stood on such issues, but that would be unlikely in the present circumstances.

[Audio recording of debate]

The TAC Without the Tic

[First on an unrelated topic, best wishes to all my friends of Asian ancestry for a Happy New Year!]

Like in the former Soviet Union and today's China, one often has to infer what is going on at FCC in spectrum policy by "reading tea leaves" or looking for indirect signals. Thus my pre-FCC Cold War experience comes in useful some times.

If you go to the FCC home page you can see that FCC now has 10 advisory committees: Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Committee, Consumer Advisory Committee, Diversity Federal Advisory Committee, Hurricane Katrina Independent Panel , Intergovernmental Advisory Committee, Media Security and Reliability Council, Network Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC), North American Numbering Council, Technological Advisory Council (TAC) and WRC-07 Advisory Committee.

The TAC is one of the oldest of these, dating to 1999 but does the TAC really exist today? Is this a general indication of the FCC's interest in technical policy issues - an intrinsic part of its jurisdiction? Let's examine recent "tea leaves". The TAC hasn't met since July 20, 2006 -- which was its only meeting in 2006. Then look at this:

[Click on image to go to original document]

The TAC meeting for October 25, 2006 was mysteriously cancelled 2 days in advance, The meeting had only been publicly announced on October 18th and was supposed to deal with "Broadband Communications Technology Development". It has never been rescheduled nor have any other meetings been scheduled. (Unconfirmed rumor has it that something on the TAC agenda for this meeting was controversial with the 8th floor and hence the sudden cancellation.) The present TAC Charter says "The Council will meet three to five times per year, with the possibility of more frequent meetings by informal subcommittees."

A little on the background of the TAC. In 1997 both the Engineering and Technology Practice Committee of the Federal Communications Bar Association (FCBA) and the Committee on Communications and Information Policy (CCIP) of IEEE - United States Activities (IEEE-USA) recommended to FCC that they create an technical advisory committee to help with that part of the FCC's jurisdiction. This was based on the experience of other regulatory agencies with technical jurisdiction such as EPA, NRC, FDA, and FAA. These are very well documented in a book from Brookings Institution entitled The Advisers. In FDA, advisory committees de facto make most of the major new drug decisions but in other agencies they serve more as a review function and an extra resource. Given the lack of people with technical policy backgrounds at the top levels of FCC leadership one would think some version of this type of backup would be useful.

While the FCBA group was discussing the concept, a distinguished communications lawyer observed, "Some technical policy questions actually have answers!" By this he meant that while most bottom line decisions on spectrum must consider both technical and nontechnical issues in a subjective way, there are subproblems within these decisions that have objective answers. He specifically mentioned the controversy at that time of U-NII and one band that was to be shared with satellite uplinks. Some argued that as few as 10,000 U-NII terminals in the US could degrade the satellite uplinks, others argued that the number was more like 100,000,000. Now reasonable people can disagree about assumptions but it seemed strange that the two sides were off by 4 orders of magnitude/40 dB! This would seem an excellent example for some objective outside advice.

The FCBA and IEEE-USA letter went to Chairman Hundt who forwarded them to OET. Senior OET managers felt threatened by the suggestion and dragged their feet until Hundt left. Chairman Kinnard and incoming OET Chief Dale Hatfield were less threatened and implemented the suggestion but addressed staff concerns by limiting the charter to advising the Commission on new technologies that were on the horizon as opposed to pending issues. Thus the TAC has never addressed any aspect of the multiyear Nextel/public safety 800 MHz interference issue nor the ongoing "TV whitespace"/Docket 04-186 issue. This avoidance of key issues results from both senior OET staff wanting to avoid any threat to their power and influence and a desire by TAC chair Bob Lucky to avoid controversy that might be divisive.

Bran Ferran, the well respected head of Walt Disney Imagineering and CTO of Disney was a charter member of TAC and dropped out because of the limited scope and the lack of interest of FCC leadership. He told me that he had been involved in a similar committee at SEC and that after every meeting they had some "face time" with the SEC Chairman. At TAC meetings, an FCC commissioner sometimes drops in to say a few words at the beginning and disappears. Sometimes 8th floor staff stays, usually not.

As said above, I believe that an invigorated TAC could add value to technical rulemakings by looking at key technical subproblems. It need not come up with a definitive answer in all cases (satisfying Chairman Lucky's concern about avoiding divisive controversy) but could list the pros and cons and issues that have to be considered. let me gie one specific example. In 04-186, the proponents say that one could build a DTV signal detector that could be effective at input levels as low as -114 dBm. Opponents of the NPRM say that such a detector would always have false alarms and thus would be useless. OK, TAC, what are the issues here?

The wireless industry is a key contributor to the US economy both in its magnitude and its impact on other sectors as a key infrastructure for both economic efficiency and public safety. As Admiral Rickover said to young Lt. Jimmy Carter, "Why not the best?"

World’s First Analogue Switchoff Rather an Anti-climax

Smooth transition to digital TV in the Netherlands with KPN receiving spectrum for HDTV and extra channels

[This item is reprinted with permission from PolicyTracker, a London-based publication that covers the European spectrum scene very well. Hence, the strange spelling.] Surprisingly, there was almost no reaction when the Netherlands became the first country to switch over to digital television, completely closing down analog transmissions. The country is 98 per cent-wired for cable, and only a few border hamlets don't have it. Analogue TV households numbered only 74,000 out of a nation of 18 million. Those who do not have cable have already been able to access almost the same offer via digital terrestrial television for the past two years. So it is not surprising that the Dutch Ministry for Telecommunications received almost no complaints when the shift took place on the night of 10 December. The public television networks had advertised the changeover for months in advance, as had KPN, the telecommunications incumbent which handled the switchover. In return for managing the process KPN will be able to use the liberated bandwidth for more digital channels and for HDTV. Regulators regard digital terrestrial as a way of making a cable-saturated market more competitive. Cable costs about €30 a month, while a basic digital terrestrial service is free, additional channels cost around €7 a month. The cable HDTV offer has suffered from a lack of sufficient decoder boxes to satisfy demand. This caused an outcry during the last World Cup competition in Germany--fortunately for the regulators, the rather poor Dutch squad was quickly knocked out. Although the Dutch were the first in the world to make the changeover Finland is due to follow later this year and Sweden in 2008. But, perhaps because of the Dutch experience, there is little expectation of difficulty in Finland either. This is in sharp contrast to the UK, where there is continuing concern about the expense of ensuring that technophobes and the elderly make a smooth transition to digital.

Sounds of Silence,Costs of Silence

Many people trying to organize spectrum-related conferences in the past two years have noted an odd phenomenon: it is almost impossible to get FCC speakers. The FCC staff has been very discrete as to why this is happening, but the reason is quite clear. The Chairman's Office has imposed unprecedented approval requirements on all public appearances of FCC staffers and acceptance of conference/workshop invitations. While one can understand hesitation about allowing junior staffers to make statements about policy issues at meetings, keeping senior staffers on a very short leash is much harder to understand.

And this leash applies even to attending meetings. An example, for the IEEE DySPAN conference on cognitive radio technology in November 2005 in Baltimore I was able to convince the organizers that since their budget was in good shape due to a surge in registrations they should invite a few FCC staffers to attend for free. (The present sickly FCC training and travel budgets would have made FCC payment of registration fees unrealistic.) I passed this offer to FCC contacts and was told that the Chairman's Office had to approve such free registration even if there was no speaking involved. Now as it turned out, the Chairman's Office approved it. But FCC has 40+ "senior executives" on its payroll. If none of them have delegated authority to make such decisions, what do they have authority to do?

So the net impact of this is a lot fewer FCC attendees and speakers at spectrum conferences and less effective interaction with industry. Sure, multibillion dollar corporations can send people to DC to interact with FCC staff, but smaller firms are unlikely to encounter FCC staff outside of DC.

Innovative wireless technology requires significant investment to get it from the pages of IEEE journals into the marketplace. Wireless technology is, of course, highly regulated and this regulation raises investment risks, making other technical investments more desirable than wireless. In countries with spectrum regulation more related to Soviet economic planning, e.g. Europe and Japan, this risk is compensated by the presence of a clear plan that moderates risk and discourages competitive nonendorsed technologies. But this has not been the basic US spectrum policy for decades.

The US deregulated marketplace spectrum industry needs better dialogwith industry to make investments in new technology. Let me give an historical example of the impact of such dialog:

Just before I retired from FCC in March 2004, IEEE 802 invited me to a conference in Florida to talk about the regulatory beginnings of 802.11/Wi-Fi. My talk is on my website. Vic Hayes, the pioneering leader of 802.11 who is generally credited in forging the original standards development, also gave a presentation entitled "Impact of (FCC) Spread Spectrum Rules on the Wireless IEEE 802 standards". Vic recalls in slide 13 of the presentation,

Quote from the minutes
• Fort Lauderdale, FA
November 11-15, 1991
• “The presentation by Dr. M. Marcus
from the FCC at Worcester
Polytechnic on Friday does invite
further comment. The FCC remains
interested in the voice of the
people.”

Frankly, I barely recall this conference 16 years ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. But it was interesting to find out much later that it had a positive impact on early 802.11 deliberations. Such presentation of midlevel FCC staffers just aren't being made anymore.

It is unrealistic to expect junior and midlevel FCC staffers to be allowed to speak on the most sensitive policy issues, but why can they attend meetings and speak on established policies or describe ongoing NPRMs? Why can't senior people give insights into deliberations in Washington as they generally have done for decades? Let's keep secret pending decisions but have a dialog on general policies.

[Picture from Wikipedia.]

No Noos is Good Noos!

Noos is a large French CATV company and has the traditional cable monopoly in Paris. [Noos is now called Numericable , probably to try to get away from their bad reputation. No indication of a major change in their performance.] After almost 3 years as a customer I cancelled my contract with them this week because they are experiencing a customer service meltdown. There is a moral here for US telecom companies that don't learn to adapt with the times or focus too much on new opportunities.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, there are many French companies competing for "triple play": offerring a package of CATV, Internet, and telephone service. This could be a highly profitable business with a lot of consumer benefits. Somehow Noos has screwed it up. The usual French word used in Paris to describe their recent performance is "un désastre".

The photo? It shows irate Noos customers waiting for >1 hour outside a Noos "boutique" to talk with a real staffer. (The man in front of the door facing the camera is the security staffer who job appears to be to keep the customers from attacking the staff.)

Why not call, you ask? Taking a line from US firms, Noos has outsourced their call handling operation to Morocco and Tunisia just like US firms outsource to India. Only problem is that English is better known today in India than French is these days in Morocco and Tunisia. Then Noos used a trick some other French companies do and made all customer service calls the equivalent of a US "900 number" so you have to pay 0.34 euros/minute or $0.44/minute for being on hold or talking to someone who really can't communicate due to language problems. (This fee even applies to billing issues!)

So why am I cancelling service? In late December they were doing repairs to the outside of my building and discovered that the Noos installer had used a shortcut to get the cable to my apartment: he had drilled 2 holes through the exterior wall of the building and run the cable through an exterior gutter. The head of the condo association, syndic de coproprietaires, explained that this was forbidden and risked leaks into the exterior walls. He told me they would cut the cable and seal the holes in a few days and told me to call Noos to explain the problem. His son even volunteered to explain the whole thing to Noos and spent hours trying to reach them. Another French friend has spent hours trying to reach Noos also. After all of this, two Noos technicians actually have appeared at our apartment since late December. Both were without any tools and couldn't do anything except ask for a different type of technician. We have also had 4 missed appointments.

If we weren't moving back to the US in a few months, I would switch to DBS or DSL-based video/IPTV. However, in view of our pending move, we will rent videos more and buy more video from Apple's iPod iTunes store. (A little known iPod feature is that with a $10 cable you can connect it to a TV with video/audio inputs and get a good picture on a real TV rather than the iPod screen.)

Convergence is a good opportunity for companies to expand their business dramatically and for customers to get new services. However, alienating existing customers is not a good policy and can happen if you are not careful.

There are many good points to living in France: the culture, the food, the scenery, etc. Noos isn't one of them. Fortunately convergence has given Noos competitors now. If the French government either allows economic darwinism to work here or acts like an effective regulator in the public interest this problem should be resolved. However, in France such actions are often viewed as "anglo-saxon values" and thus are not too likely.

UPDATE:

The February 17th issue of Le Parisien had a very similar picture of irate customers and announced that French consumer protection agency was placing Noos under "haute surveillance" and that Noos is supposed to sort things out in 1 1/2 months. Summary from web site:

Noos sous haute surveillance

Poussée par la colère croissante des abonnés, la Direction de la concurrence a contraint hier le câblo-opérateur à apporter des réponses rapides. Noos s'est engagé à traiter tous les dossiers d'ici à un mois et demi.

Noos Press Release February 16, 2007 (in French) [This has now disappeared from the Noos website. I guess it is an episode they don't want to remember.]

Press release of Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes on the Noos situation, February 16, 2007 (in French)

[I give permission to reuse this posting and the picture to anyone else who wants to write about the Noos situation. I would appreciate it, though, if you would send me a copy of how you use it.]