Venable recently hosted a webinar titled, “Possible FCC Regulation of Receivers: What Can Go Right? And What Can Go Wrong?” which was covered by TR Daily. The panel was moderated by Laura Stefani. Here is an excerpt.
The NOI noted that though the FCC has traditionally focused on transmitter requirements, the performance of receivers, particularly those without “sufficient interference immunity,” can affect the Commission’s ability to facilitate the provision of new services in the same or nearby spectrum bands utilized by existing services.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt [questions about interference and new services are] going to continue to arise,” said Dean Brenner, a wireless industry consultant and chairman of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council. "They’re going to continue to pose technical, political, economic issues, and usually important issues. I think it makes sense for the FCC to try to say whether they can move forward in some fashion. Whether it would be some kind of policy statement, whether it would be something more specific than that, we’ll have to see. But I think that anyone who is into the FCC world should be thinking about this, should be thinking about how to participate in it because it really does get to the issues that just keep arising as the FCC tries to make new spectrum bands available.”
Pierre de Vries, a co-director emeritus of the Spectrum Policy Initiative and a distinguished adviser at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder, argued that the FCC should be more transparent about its long-term expectations for possible receiver requirements.
“More radio services, of more different kinds, that are more resilient are going to be good for all of us,” he said. “The FCC, by focusing explicitly, and almost exclusively, on transmitters, has left half of the puzzle hidden under the table cloth. So this proceeding actually brings all the puzzle pieces onto the table and hopefully we’ll get a better outcome this time.”