NTIA Spectrum Strategy Faces Rift Over Sharing vs. Exclusivity

OTI is mentioned in a Communications Daily article about the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s efforts to craft a national spectrum strategy, with OTI filing comments with Public Knowledge on behalf of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition to urge the NTIA to prioritize public interest.

A policy focus should be maximization of spectrum access by promoting spectrum sharing and investing in spectrum reuse tech, said a coalition including Public Knowledge, New America's Open Technology Institute, American Libraries Association and Next Century Cities. They also urged use of interference metrics that reflect actual interference. The citizens broadband radio service three-tiered sharing framework "should be embraced as a model" that gives local access to an occupied band while protecting incumbents like DOD, they said. NTIA should "explicitly recognize" that approach as "one of the government’s most successful spectrum policy innovations," they said. The agency also should endorse opportunistic access in underutilized bands as the default approach. And NTIA and the FCC should partner to allow bidirectional sharing, authorizing federal users to have secondary and opportunistic access to all licensed commercial bands on a non-interference basis.