Telecom Group wants more US Airwaves for Disasters

TELECOM GROUP WANTS MORE US AIRWAVES FOR DISASTERS
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Jeremy Pelofsky]
More airwaves should be reserved for public safety and emergency workers in the United States to guarantee they can communicate with each other in disasters, wireless industry executives said on Thursday. One of the major issues that arose out of the rubble left behind by the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina was the difficulty emergency workers had talking via two-way radios. As the Federal Communications Commission readies an auction of airwaves being given up by television broadcasters, Morgan O'Brien, who co-founded Nextel Communications, urged the government to withhold 30 Megahertz (Mhz) from the sale for building a wireless network for public safety officials. The 30 megahertz represents about half of the airwaves to be sold in the auction, which must begin by early 2008. Congress ordered the sale and wants the proceeds, likely to be billions of dollars, to help trim the U.S. budget deficit. O'Brien, through a new venture he formed with other former Nextel executives named Cyren Call Communications Corp., is calling for the airwaves to be put into a trust that would lease them to commercial providers to build a network for both public safety officials and companies to use. It would likely require some 37,000 wireless towers to cover most of the U.S. population, O'Brien said.
http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=telecomm&storyID...

* A Fix for Radio Woes?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR200604...

* Bush: ‘We have to be ready’
[SOURCE: MSNBC]
"Obviously there was a communications problem, as you well know, and we have pre-position communications equipment, or have communications equipment ready that is available that will help us in case of a big storm."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12519819/from/RSS/

* Spectrum for Safety: Is There Enough? (May 2, 2006)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=93637&WT.svl=news2_1