Thanks to effective marketing efforts, many people undoubtedly believe that the reason the country’s digital transition took place last year was so that government could ensure a better TV-viewing experience. The reality, of course, isn’t so altruistic. The analog spectrum on which television had been traditionally broadcast was — and is — a valuable piece of radio real estate. By requiring TV broadcasts to go digital, broadcasters can pack more data into much narrower bandwidth, which means more content with improved television picture and better sound — just as promised.

The analog spectrum, meanwhile, saw all those bandwidth-hogging television broadcasts cleared out. The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 granted the FCC authority to reallocate analog channels 52 through 69, known as the 700 MHz band, to the highest bidder. So the digital transition wasn’t about better TV for all, but (unsurprisingly) rather about money. However, the act did require that a portion of the spectrum, known as the D Block, be auctioned with the stipulation that the winning bidder form a public-private partnership under the direction of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust Corp. (PSST), a nonprofit consisting of public safety groups, to build a nationwide public safety broadband network.

The auction, held in 2008 before the actual digital switchover, was a boon for the government, raking in $20 billion from the auction of four blocks of spectrum. There was only one problem: No one bid on the D Block, at least not enough to meet its $1.3 billion reserve price. The lack of bidders was blamed on the public safety network requirement. Since the auction failure, the FCC has done nothing with the D Block. This stagnation recently led to 17 state and local governments to try to get the ball rolling again on their own by asking the FCC to drop the idea of auctioning the D Block and instead let them build their own regional public safety broadband networks on the abandoned spectrum.

Cornerstone or Monkey Wrench?

On March 17, the FCC is scheduled to deliver Congress its formal report on a plan to build out a national broadband network. Absent from this report will be the public safety portion of the network, since the D Block continues to go unused. That’s where the 17 state and local governments come in, including cities such as Boston, San Francisco and San Antonio, and states like New York, New Mexico and New Jersey. They’ve all filed applications to the FCC asking the agency to waive the requirement that the D Block be auctioned. Rather, these cities and states are asking the FCC to let them build their own regional broadband networks, possibly through public-private partnerships, using the D Block portion of the spectrum. These regional networks could help speed the development of a national broadband network.

Most of these waiver applications were sent to the FCC late last year. If any action is going to be taken, it won’t be before the FCC delivers its report to Congress, said Harlin McEwen, a former police chief and former assistant deputy director of the FBI who currently serves as chairman of the PSST.

“I don’t think anybody is opposed to what they’re trying to do,” McEwen said. “The problem is the FCC has not acted upon those applications and said it’s not likely they’re going to do anything until after the national broadband plan comes out on March 17.”

Indeed, there’s broad support for the movement, even from industry players like Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T among those that were supposed to have been the ones to bid on the D Block. The general idea is that the FCC ought to just give the D Block to public safety agencies and let them choose how to build a broadband network and with whom to partner. But the FCC hasn’t indicated it will do anything other than put the D Block back up for auction.

On Jan. 12, Alcatel-Lucent issued a statement on the matter: “Once again, the FCC is planning to address this issue by the disposition of the D Block via auction, a process that failed miserably when previously implement[ed]. Public safety officials, service providers and infrastructure vendors agree that a more effective method would be to allocate the D Block directly to public safety organizations in order to create a national broadband network that would meet the critical needs of first responders.”

The problem is, in addition to waiting on the FCC, there’s no working plan for the applicants to coalesce around. Some cities and states may have funding ready to go, some may not. No standards have been agreed upon, so there’s no guarantee these projects, should they move forward, won’t actually hurt a national broadband network instead of help.

McEwen said the PSST is trying to bring the applicants together to develop a workable strategy, one that he hopes will help influence the FCC to decide in their favor.

“The PSST has been supportive of those waivers,” McEwen said. “The PSST has formed a new advisory committee called the Operator Advisory Committee. We had our first organizational meeting with some of the 17, not all of them, back in January. We’re reaching out to the other waiver applications because we don’t even know who’s in charge of some of them other than the attorneys who filed [the applications]. We’re trying to establish who is running those operations, getting our arms around that, and begin to have discussions between the 17 [state and local governments seeking a waiver from the D Block requirement] so they can share information with us and each other.”