Greetings. I have, no thanks to snow-related delays in Ed Hare's tortuous effort to return to his office from business travel to the West Coast, finally had a chance to extensively discuss with Ed the BPL Second Report and Order. We have developed a proposed plan that will be vetted to the Executive Committee and, in this instance, to the full Board as well, within the next few days. Our plan includes a Petition for Reconsideration, which would be due within 30 days following Federal Register publication of the Second Report and Order. That publication has not yet occurred. There is ample basis, unfortunately, for a Petition for Reconsideration and it is critically important, we believe, to pursue that option in order to have any leverage within the industry for a longer term solution to the regulatory problem here. More on that shortly. The FCC has acted, once again, shamefully, and it is important that they not be able to close the books on this in the fashion they have. We must, we believe, be blunt with the Commission, yet incisive in noting the many flawed contentions in the 2nd R&O.
We will absolutely protect the Board's options to return to the Court of Appeals should the Commission's divergence from the record in this proceeding that Ed and I painstakingly built prove so substantial as to provide us a meaningful opportunity to go back to the Court again with an expectation of a further remand or reversal. A decision on that will not be necessary in the near term, and it may be that we can through our Petition for Reconsideration set up a favorable basis for a further Court appeal if the Board wishes to pursue that route. But as you will see we will also have some longer-term alternative options to propose that may have more chance of benefiting Amateur Radio, since FCC continues to stonewall so blatantly.
Finally, I have never been as impressed with Mitch Lazarus (or his perceived "effectiveness") as Dave seems to be, and I am far, far less impressed with Mitch Lazarus than is Mitch Lazarus. Beyond that, any comments I would make about the gentleman would be even more unprofessional than that one, so I won't make any more here. Suffice it to say that his evaluation of the BPL Order is not something I will dwell on in the wee hours of the morning. In this respect I daresay Ed Hare and I are in agreement.
73, Chris W3KD
Christopher D. Imlay
Booth, Freret, Imlay & Tepper. P.C.
14356 Cape May Road
Silver Spring, Maryland 20904-6011
(301) 384-5525 telephone
(301) 384-6384 facsimile
W3KD@ARRL.ORG
-----Original Message-----
From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ, K1ZZ <dsumner@arrl.org>
To: arrl-odv <arrl-odv@arrl.org>
Sent: Tue, Nov 1, 2011 11:18 am
Subject: [arrl-odv:20290] Re: FW: FCC Fiddles with Rulesfor Broadband-over-Power-Line
Actually, Mitchell doesn’t miss much. I rather like him, as I suspect does Chris – it’s just that from our perspective he’s usually on the wrong side of the issue. I just wish he was less effective.
I haven’t checked this with Chris, but my reading of the Second R&O is that the Commission did what the Court ordered them to do – so going back to the Court of Appeals would be a waste of time and money. However, I think we will want to petition for reconsideration. There are factual errors in the Second R&O, they relied on a clearly defective online database to conclude that there is a low probability of interference, and I believe the Commission’s concession in paragraph 43 gives us a basis for arguing that notching should be mandatory.
Dave
Dave, congratulations on becoming president of the ARRL <grin>. But that’s not the first point Mr. Lazarus has ever missed, is it?
A reporter from Bill Pasternak’s bulletin service requested an interview with me about the new (new?) BPL rules but I asked for a rain check on the grounds that the ARRL had not yet determined what our next step will be.
73 – Kay N3KN