Trip Report Washington, DC - December 8, 2005 On Thursday, December 8 I flew to Washington for a series of meetings. Chris Imlay accompanied me on the first two, at the FCC. The first was an 11 AM meeting with Michael Wilhelm and Bill Cross of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau on license restructuring (WT Docket No. 05-235). I arrived at the FCC more than an hour early, intending to hang out near a WiFi hot spot until Chris was scheduled to arrive at 10:15 and we could go over our game plan. However, when I checked in the security desk telephoned upstairs so I had to go up to the 3rd floor and let Bill meet me in the elevator lobby. I apologized for being so early, but he asked me to come back to his office for a few minutes. He showed me the day's Communications Daily item about BPL (the gist of which was that "analysts" were predicting little if any BPL growth in 2006 despite what the "industry" was saying) and shared his thoughts about BPL strategy, the gist of which was that we needed more vocal allies from other services and that, despite our technical arguments, the Commissioners were unlikely to pick winners and losers from among the competing BPL technologies. I went back downstairs to meet Chris as planned, and we went back up to the 3rd floor. When the four of us met I said that I knew they had met previously with ARRL representatives to hear our restructuring views and would not repeat that discussion. I would let our comments in the proceeding speak for themselves, but wanted to emphasize two points. First, while we did not press our "automatic upgrade" proposal in the comments, there is no point in maintaining the distinction in privileges between Technicians who had passed a code test and those who had not. If the code test is not going to be required any longer, it only makes sense for all Technicians to have HF privileges. Second, it is important that the proceeding not languish. We plan to promote Amateur Radio more actively in 2006 through the "Hello" campaign, to present Amateur Radio as friendly and welcoming and to make present licensees feel better about being hams, but to do that we need to know what the licensing requirements and privileges will be. Michael Wilhelm acknowledged the legitimacy of our marketing concern, but could make no commitment as to when the Report and Order would be released. They have four big boxes of comments to go through (I saw them printed out in Bill Cross's office) and they claim to have no control over when the higher-ups will act on the draft once it's ready. Until a draft is prepared there is no point in our going higher in the FCC hierarchy to encourage quick action. However, we should stay in regular contact with Bill Cross both to encourage him to work on the draft and to know when it is ready for circulation. Chris then brought up the Florida radio interference statute. Wilhelm was clearly familiar with the issue, was sympathetic to our position, and said that our petition for a declaratory ruling from the FCC invalidating the statute was well done. Chris reported a recent prosecution of the owner of a radio tower for "enabling" a pirate broadcaster by leasing tower space. The tower owner had plea-bargained a fine and community service, to which Wilhelm commented that he hadn't had a very good lawyer. Wilhelm was not pleased to hear that the FCC district office apparently had aided in the prosecution; Chris promised to provide him with more details. Our concern, of course, is not with this particular prosecution but with the fact that an amateur might be subject to prosecution in the event of an interference complaint brought under the statute. While on the 3rd floor I picked up a signal that some edits are flowing on the draft Report and Order in the Part 97 Omnibus proceeding, WT Docket No. 04-140. Chris has an action item to contact the Chairman's office to encourage them to nudge this out the door. Chris and I then went up to the 8th floor to meet with Barry Ohlson, Senior Legal Advisor to Commissioner Adelstein. The purpose of the 20-minute meeting was to discuss our petition for further rulemaking on BPL. Chris did most of the talking this time. We reminded Ohlson of Commissioner Adelstein's comments on October 14, 2004 when the BPL Report and Order was adopted. He had said: "It is clear that some Access BPL systems can co-exist very well with existing licensees in the HF and VHF bands.... Other Access BPL systems, though, have not fared so well, and these systems should not deployed on a commercial basis if they will continue to result in harmful interference [emphasis added]." We said that the experience of the past 14 months had proved Commissioner Adelstein right. We now knew where the line between permissible and impermissible BPL systems should be drawn, and were proposing that in our petition for further rulemaking. Chris did a good job of presenting our position as a good compromise that would work to everyone's benefit, but - as has become the norm in meetings with FCC personnel - we got very little feedback from Ohlson. After lunch Chris went to his office and I met with someone who had solicited our legislative relations business. I had agreed to the meeting because I was going to be in town and had some free time, but he clearly does not have the capacity to cover our needs. My final meeting of the day, and the one that may have been the most productive, was with Jeff Pulver, WA2BOT. Jeff is an ARRL Life Member from Long Island who was in town for the FCBA Chairman's Dinner. He had a few minutes between Commissioner Abernathy's going-away party and the dinner, and asked me to meet him at the Hilton where the dinner was being held. (He invited me to the dinner, but this was all at the last minute and I needed to fly home that evening, so I had to decline.) Jeff is a leading VoIP guru (see for example <http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2003/tc2003041_4912_tc107.htm>) and is perhaps best known for the FCC's "pulver.com" decision in 2004 (<http://pulver.com/reports/pulver-decision.pdf>) which established that VoIP would be free of most FCC regulation. Jeff generally credits his early experiences in Amateur Radio as the source of most of his ideas and success. He was accompanied by his General Counsel, Jonathan Askin, who I think qualifies as a colorful individual (his business card reads "Wartime Consigliere" - not a bad mindset for a General Counsel). Jeff had emailed me in September (when I was in Zurich) in the aftermath of Katrina, raising the possibility of achieving some synergy by bringing together radio amateurs (who have decades of experience with disaster recovery communications) and the WiFi community (which has the ability to deploy broadband access quickly in an affected area). I had told him at the time that that sounded well worth exploring. Pulvermedia (one of his companies) sponsors VoIP trade shows, in the fall in Boston and in the spring in San Jose. During our meeting Jeff suggested putting together a panel discussion on disaster recovery, with ARRL participation, during the March 14-17, 2006 show in San Jose and said he would donate free booth space to the ARRL if we want to exhibit. He said 5-10% of his conference attendees are hams, although many are not currently active. I told him this sounded very interesting and that we would like to pursue it. A travel note: I was able to get a $158 fare on US Airways to National Airport (DCA). While such fares are unlikely to be regularly available it will be worth checking for them in the future, since flying to National is a whole lot more convenient than taking Southwest to Baltimore (it's a short $1.35 Metro ride from DCA to anywhere you might want to go in DC). David Sumner, K1ZZ Chief Executive Officer