The National Telecommunications & Information
Administration appears to have beaten its Oct. 1 deadline for reporting to the White House on its plan for
freeing up spectrum through more efficiency and reclamation.
The Presidential memorandum to the heads of
departments and agencies June 28 directed NTIA to "collaborate with
the FCC to complete by October 1, 2010, a specific Plan and Timetable for
identifying and making available 500 MHz of spectrum."
NTIA submitted its report to the White House
earlier this week, said the source. The report was not available for public inspection
at press time, in contrast to the FCC's national broadband plan report and its
spectrum plans, for example, which was publicly available on deadline day,
though a deadline pushed back a month to March 17.
The hold-up on the NTIA report is said to be
the federal interagency clearance process for a report dealing with
"sensitive" federal government spectrum use, like that of the Defense
Department.
NTIA is responsible for the government
spectrum involved, but the spectrum plan is a collaborative effort, and the
targets, like 120 MHz from broadcasters, are not set in stone, so the two
are interdependent.
In other words, what the NTIA says it is
going to do will impact what the FCC does in terms of its part of the plan.
