Technical Topics, May 2004
NASWA To File BPL NPRM Comments
As this issue of the NASWA Journal goes to press, NASWA is getting ready to submit its comments to the FCC on the BPL NPRM, ET docket 04-37. Comments are due by May 3. If you have not yet filed, there are three requests for time extension currently being considered by the FCC so you may still have time. BPL is currently being deployed under existing Part 15 rules. Hopefully the points in the draft NASWA response will help you formulate your own response. There is strength in numbers. The FCC thinks only hams are worried. Be a squeaky wheel and maybe you can help us get some grease.
International Agreements
The FCC is required to observe the rights of other nations to broadcast directly, without interference, to listeners in the United States on frequencies allocated by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) exclusively for this purpose. The United States is a member of the ITU, an international organization within the United Nations system and a signator to its most recent radio regulation convention.
ITU Radio Regulation 4.11 reads: “Member States recognize that among frequencies which have long-distance propagation characteristics, those in the bands between 5 and 30 MHz are particularly useful for long-distance communications; they agree to make every possible effort to reserve these bands for such communications. Whenever frequencies in these bands are used for short-range or medium-distance communications, the minimum power necessary shall be employed.”
ITU Radio Regulation 15.12 reads, “Administrations shall take all practicable and necessary steps to ensure that the operation of electrical apparatus or installations of any kind, including power and telecommunication distribution networks, but excluding equipment used for industrial, scientific and medical applications, does not cause harmful interference to a radiocommunication service and, in particular, to a radionavigation or any other safety service operating in accordance with the provisions of these Regulations.”
ITU regulations allocate certain frequencies between 2 and 26 megahertz for the exclusive use of international broadcasters. Early experimental testing has shown some BPL systems will interfere with international broadcast transmissions if not protected by FCC regulations.
The FCC Proposal Is Impractical
In its NPRM the FCC acknowledges that the present Part 15 emission limits will often be inadequate to protect listeners to the International Broadcast Service from BPL interference. Instead of addressing the interference issue directly by adopting either of NASWA’s previous recommendations in response to the NOI Docket 03-104, the FCC proposes a complex and, what NASWA considers to be, impractical procedure to hopefully minimize the impact of the interference. (NASWA previously recommended that Part 15 radiation limits be tightened to avoid interference to the International Broadcast Service or BPL transmissions be relocated to frequencies outside the 2-26 MHz range.) The FCC’s failure to address the root problem will eventually result in the failure of BPL as a viable competitor for DSL and cable TV broadband. That is not what NASWA, the BPL industry, nor the FCC desire.
The FCC’s proposed procedure is impractical for the following reasons:
- The FCC proposes to impose on the victim the burden of identifying, reporting, proving and following up on complaints of interference. In this case the victim is the largely non-technical international broadcast listener. In theory, once notified, the BPL service provider must quickly activate dynamic frequency agility in order to move the energy to a frequency that does not cause interference to the entity that complained. Of course the energy may now be interfering with another user of the 2-26 MHz spectrum who will then complain. An endless feedback loop could thus be formed. Each complaint will result in a change to the energy-density spectrum and each change could result in a new complaint.
- As a class, international broadcast listeners are not technically astute. Most listeners know only how to pull up the whip antenna on their radio, activate the “on” switch, select the frequency they want to listen to, and adjust the volume. Unlike amateur radio or professional operators who are required to demonstrate a certain level of technical competency in order to obtain an FCC license or employment, broadcast listeners are not licensed (nor should they be) and cannot be expected to know the interference they are receiving has the identifying signature of a BPL signal. If such naïve persons are able to figure out to whom to complain, it is inevitable that their complaints will often be in error. The result will be skepticism, disbelief, and denial by the BPL industry. The cost to investigate erroneous interference reports will be borne by either the BPL industry or the FCC or both. The burden of proof will be on the unskilled listener to demonstrate to the BPL provider or the FCC enforcement function that the interference claim is valid. To expect unskilled listeners to prove that BPL is the cause of their interference problem is unreasonable and makes the FCC proposal impractical. A better solution must be found.
- International broadcasters change frequencies as a function of time of day, season of the year, and time within the eleven-year solar sunspot cycle. If the FCC insists on implementing its proposed approach, BPL providers will incur significant costs as they react to these changes in real time. If BPL is ever to become a viable alternative to cable and DSL broadband access, operating costs must be minimized. The FCC’s proposal has the opposite effect. To be effective, the FCC’s proposed rules will require BPL operators to incur increased costs by mandating near-real-time response to interference complaints and a staff standing by the telephone to receive and act upon such complaints.
- If the FCC insists on implementing its proposed approach, the FCC must mandate a specific response time for interference complaints to be resolved. In the NPRM the FCC proposes no particular response time for the BPL provider to react to interference complaints. Any interference to international broadcasting is illegal under both international radio regulations and the FCC’s own Part 15 regulations that require that interference must be promptly terminated. The BPL provider could delay its response indefinitely as they tell the victim that the problem is being investigated or that the interference is not coming from their BPL signals. The response time should be as fast as possible. Ten minutes is suggested as a reasonable time delay for correction of a problem. If the problem is not corrected within the specified time, the BPL service must cease operation, as required by the FCC Part 15 regulations, until the problem can be corrected or a third party arbitrator can make a determination.
- If the FCC insists on implementing its proposed approach, fines must be prescribed in the FCC Part 15 regulations to enforce timely response to interference complaints. NASWA suggests $10,000 per day per complaint not resolved within the prescribed time limit would be sufficient incentive to the BPL industry to respond in a timely way. This suggested fine amount is consistent with fines levied upon other licensed services that willfully violate FCC regulations.
- If the FCC insists on implementing its proposed approach, the FCC must mandate that industry “customer service” representatives and technicians be on duty 24 hours per day and 7 days per week to take interference complaints and be able to quickly activate frequency agile technology to eliminate the interference. The industry “customer service” representatives must also be fluent in major foreign languages as many who rely on international radio broadcasts in the USA are not fluent in English. The cost to the BPL providers of such overhead and the general lack of foreign language fluency in the USA labor pool makes the FCC’s proposed procedure impractical.
- The FCC does not propose any third party entity to arbitrate disputes. If the FCC insists on implementing its proposed approach, it is likely that the enforcement function of the FCC will become that de facto arbitrator. The FCC will become burdened with such complaints if BPL systems proliferate and BPL providers, themselves overloaded with complaints, fail to respond in a timely manner. The additional burden on the FCC enforcement function will raise the cost to the taxpayer and possibly raise FCC user fees to the BPL industry as the cost of arbitration is transferred to the industry that is causing the added expense. Such disputes will make implementation of the proposed procedures burdensome and impractical.
- Many international broadcast listeners are tourists, foreign students or immigrants to this country with limited English language ability. These people use short-wave radios to keep in touch with events in their country of origin by listening to foreign broadcasts in their native language. These victims of BPL interference cannot be expected to arm themselves with knowledge about BPL interference signatures, industry data base(s), identities of local BPL providers, whom to call to register a complaint, or to whom to appeal when no action results from their complaint. NASWA believes that is asking too much of people who are not proficient in BPL technology, the English language, or FCC bureaucratic procedures.
- The FCC has elected not to standardize the modulation format for BPL transmission. The spectral signature of BPL interference will be different for each type of modulation. There will likely be as many interference signatures as there are BPL equipment manufacturers. Even if international broadcast listeners could be reached with instructive material to teach them what BPL interference sounds like, the many different BPL interference signatures will make it impossible to conduct such training on anything other than a local level. It is unlikely that power companies or third party BPL service providers will be particularly interested in conducting such training for the general public in their service areas.
- Many international broadcast listeners use portable receivers when traveling around the USA. Such listeners cannot be expected to know the contact information for reporting BPL interference in each area they travel through. The proposed procedure is impractical.
Can BPL Broadband Access Replace International Broadcasting?
Some may argue that the broadband access provided by wide deployment of BPL will allow listeners to access overseas media via the Internet so they will not need international broadcasting to provide a link. Today, access to foreign broadcasts is free for the price of a portable short-wave radio selling in the neighborhood of $100 or less. The suggestion that immigrants, often living at or near the poverty level, should be forced to subscribe to an Internet service to receive what they now get for free is unfair and discriminates against many of the poorest people in our society. The suggestion that tourists need to lug a computer with them to listen to the news in their native language is unrealistic. Some listeners prefer to listen to international broadcasts while traveling in their cars. There is presently no way to access such broadcasts via broadband services including BPL from a moving automobile.
The Best Solution
In view of the impracticality of the procedure proposed by the FCC in the NPRM, NASWA suggests that the FCC withdraw the subject NPRM, revisit the issue and address the actual problem. The problem is that current Part 15 radiation limits are insufficient to prevent BPL interference to duly authorized international broadcasters operating between 2 and 26 MHz on receivers of a type normally used and marketed in the USA for in-home reception.
There are two possible technical solutions. One possible solution is for the FCC to mandate that BPL systems permanently suppress the use of frequencies that are allocated by the ITU for international broadcasting. Because every user of the HF spectrum, like amateur radio operators, aircraft communications, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense, will likely request similar protection, few frequencies would remain for BPL below 30 MHz.
The second possible solution, and the one which NASWA prefers, would be to confine BPL emissions to frequencies above 30 MHz with appropriate notches in the spectrum to protect local public safety, broadcasting, aeronautical, amateur radio, space research, personal and industrial communications, and ITU-allocated radio astronomy frequencies in this range. For example, in a given area only about half the VHF television channels are occupied at most. Four vacant 6 MHz channels, out of the 12 VHF channels available, would allow a BPL provider a bandwidth of 24 MHz and obviate the need to use the 24 MHz between 2 and 26 MHz. Even in the crowded Washington DC–Baltimore or New York City TV markets, for example, channels 3, 6, 8 10 and 12 would be available for BPL.
Unlike HF international broadcasters, who change frequencies often, frequencies used by VHF services are relatively stable over time. Because VHF allocations do not shift with time of day, season of the year, or state of the eleven-year solar sunspot cycle, there would be no need for the BPL provider to establish a costly system of dealing with interference complaints in near-real time. Once notches are established for a given local area, there should be little need to change them for years. BPL providers could then avoid most of the cost of dedicating personnel to operating dynamic, frequency-agile systems in real time in response to telephone complaints and international broadcaster frequency changes. By minimizing operating costs the BPL industry will be more likely to achieve the FCC’s desired result by becoming economically viable competitors to broadband cable and DSL services.
So there you have it. You should express your concerns in the first person. If you are intimidated by the FCC’s proposed rules, tell them that. If you have other reasons you do not think the FCC’s proposed rules will not work, be sure to bring them up. You can read the NPRM at
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-04-29A1.pdf
You can file comments at:
Click on “Submit a filing” in the upper right column. You will get a fill in the blanks form. In block 1 enter 04-37. Fill in the blanks and attach either a MSWord file or type in your comments at the bottom of the page. Thanks in advance for your help. The rights you save may be your own. Stay tuned.