TALKING POINTS: CONGRESS NEEDS TO REALLOCATE SPECTRUM FOR PUBLIC SAFETY WIRELESS BROADBAND

1) Public safety needs additional broadband spectrum for both current and future technologies such as streaming video; automated license plate recognition; and biometric technologies, including mobile fingerprint and iris identification.

2) The 9-11 Commission recommended that Congress enact legislation to increase assignment of radio spectrum for public safety purposes. Public safety's need for 20 MHz of broadband is for both now and the near future (5 years).

3) Public safety needs this particular spectrum because the propagation characteristics of the 700 MHz band are much more favorable for mountainous terrain and in-building coverage compared to higher frequency spectrum and it is contiguous to the existing 10 MHz of public safety broadband spectrum and thus will help drive down both costs and development time for communication devices.

4) Public safety needs to control this spectrum as it is the only way to guarantee that it will be available in an emergency. Too many incidents have occurred wherein the commercial wireless companies could not or would not provide the bandwidth needed in an emergency (e.g. plane crash in the Hudson River, Hurricane Katrina).

5) All members of public safety (police, fire, EMS) have come together in an unprecedented effort to support the reallocation of the 700 MHz D Block spectrum and the creation of a truly interoperable public safety wireless broadband network.

6) In the absence of swift Congressional action to remove the D Block from auction, the FCC must, under current law, "expeditiously" re-auction this critical spectrum. This would effectively preclude forever public safety's ability to obtain 20 MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 700 MHz band.

7) In the absence of a federally-funded (fully) national public safety broadband network, a private-public partnership would be necessary. In this case, we believe that public safety should hold the license and sub-lease the spectrum to the commercial providers via a Request for Proposal (RFP) process. In order to make this public-private model more attractive to the commercial providers, 20 MHz vs. 10 MHz would give local governments (particularly in rural areas) tremendous leverage in negotiating network agreements.

8) On Tuesday, January 12, the leadership of nine national public safety organizations came to Washington, DC to meet with key members of Congress and the Administration to ask for their support of this critical initiative.

9) Our sincere thanks to you for all you have done for public safety in the past. This is an important moment for us as well as the citizens we protect everyday. We hope that you will support our effort to reallocate the D Block.