In September 1996 a federal advisory committee told the FCC and NTIA that public safety radio was running out of room, and that agencies on different bands often could not talk to one another. The Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee recommended about 25 MHz of new spectrum in the near term. Within a year, Congress wrote 24 MHz of the television band into the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. This piece covers what the committee found, what it recommended, how the 700 MHz allocation followed, and what its interoperability analysis got right. It stays strictly within the 1990s record.

A 1995 charter from two agencies: who asked PSWAC to look and why

The Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration jointly chartered the Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee in 1995. It operated under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The joint sponsorship reflected how radio spectrum is managed in the United States. The FCC regulates spectrum used by everyone outside the federal government, which includes every state, county and city public safety licensee. NTIA, part of the Department of Commerce, manages the spectrum used by federal agencies. A study run by only one of them would have described only half of a problem in which county deputies and federal agents routinely worked the same incidents.

The committee’s charge, as the final report describes it, was to evaluate the wireless communications needs of federal, state and local public safety agencies through the year 2010 and to recommend how to meet them. Its members came from public safety agencies at several levels of government, from equipment manufacturers and service providers, and from other interested organizations. Much of the detailed work was done in subcommittees organized around topics that included operational requirements, interoperability, spectrum needs and technology. I am not giving a member count or naming the chair, because I have not confirmed either against the primary document, and nothing in this article depends on them.

The final report was delivered in September 1996, along with supporting material from the subcommittees. Most people who cite it today cite it secondhand through later summaries, and that includes a good share of the grant narratives and conference slides I have read over the years. Secondhand citation is how the errors discussed in the last section get started. Anyone citing PSWAC for something that matters, such as a grant application, a capital plan or a published history, should obtain the final report itself through the FCC or NTIA record and quote from it directly, rather than from a summary that has passed through several hands.

A band-by-band patchwork: the radio landscape of the mid-1990s

The committee was looking at a radio environment that had been built one band at a time over roughly half a century. In the mid-1990s, public safety licensees were spread across these bands:

• VHF low band, in the 30 to 50 MHz range
• VHF high band, around 150 to 174 MHz
• UHF, at 450 to 470 MHz
• The 470 to 512 MHz T-band, which the FCC had opened to land mobile use in a set of large metropolitan areas
• The 800 MHz band

Each band had been added when the previous one filled up or when new equipment made a higher frequency practical. Agencies tended to stay on whatever band they had built on, because moving meant replacing every portable, mobile, base station and console position at once.

In a typical region, the sheriff’s office could be running VHF high band repeaters while a large city in the same county had moved to an 800 MHz trunked system. The volunteer fire departments might still be on low band because it covered rural terrain well, and the state police might be on a band of their own. Radios of the period were built for one band, and multiband portables were not something an agency could buy as ordinary fleet equipment. Trunking added a second layer of incompatibility. The trunking protocols of that era were largely proprietary, so two 800 MHz systems from different manufacturers did not necessarily work together either. The P25 standards effort, covered in its own article in this section, had begun in 1989, but it had not yet reshaped what was in agency fleets. Most of the multi-agency radio problems I have worked on over the years still trace back to some version of this patchwork.

There was one relevant precedent. In the late 1980s, the FCC set aside a block of 800 MHz spectrum for public safety on the recommendation of an earlier body, the National Public Safety Planning Advisory Committee, known as NPSPAC. That allocation reserved channels for mutual aid and required regional plans written by Regional Planning Committees. The NPSPAC mutual aid channels showed that dedicated interoperability spectrum could be written into an allocation from the start. They also showed its limit: a channel reserved at 800 MHz did nothing for an agency whose radios were all on VHF. The regional planning model from that allocation carried forward into the 700 MHz rules a few years after PSWAC reported.

25 MHz now and more by 2010: how the committee sized the shortfall

The committee estimated future need in three steps. It looked at what public safety agencies were already doing on the air. It projected how demand would grow with population and with the number of personnel carrying radios. And it considered what new kinds of traffic agencies expected to add. That last factor drove much of the result. In 1996, most public safety radio traffic was voice, with some low-speed data to mobile terminals. The committee projected substantial growth in data and in applications such as imaging and video, which the existing narrowband channels could not carry. It then compared projected need with the spectrum public safety already held, and the gap between the two was the shortfall.

The report recommended about 25 MHz of new spectrum in the near term, within roughly five years, and a larger amount over the horizon running to 2010. The total most often cited from the report is 97.5 MHz of additional spectrum by 2010, and that is the figure that appears in later government and association summaries of PSWAC. I am presenting it as the commonly cited total. Anyone who needs the breakdown by time period and by type of use should go to the final report, because summaries divide the figure in different ways and I have seen it presented more than one way.

Two other points in the report are easy to lose behind the headline numbers. First, the report also discussed meeting part of the need through more efficient use of existing spectrum, including narrower channels and trunking, and through commercial services where they could meet public safety requirements. New spectrum was one part of its answer, not all of it. Second, the estimate was a projection to 2010. Whether that total turned out to be the right size depends on which later allocations are counted and how, and that question falls outside the 1990s record this article covers. What can be stated plainly is that Congress acted on the near-term figure within a year.

Interoperability in the 1996 report: what the committee got right

The report treated interoperability as its own need, separate from the raw capacity shortfall, and this is the part of PSWAC that has held up best. Its interoperability work is usually summarized as distinguishing three situations:

• Day-to-day: routine contact between neighboring agencies.
• Mutual aid: outside resources arriving at an incident.
• Task force: agencies from different levels of government working together over a longer period.

The distinction is still useful because the situations call for different arrangements. Day-to-day contact can be programmed into fleets in advance, because the neighbors are known. Mutual aid depends on channels that every arriving radio is known to carry. A task force running for weeks needs arrangements that hold up over time.

The barriers the report identified are the ones agencies still describe:

• Agencies on different bands had radios that physically could not tune each other’s channels.
• Agencies on the same band were often separated by incompatible systems, especially proprietary trunking.
• Few channels anywhere were set aside specifically for interoperability, and where they existed, as in the NPSPAC 800 MHz allocation, they were confined to one band.
• Planning, coordination among jurisdictions and money were obstacles in their own right. New equipment would not help a region where nobody had agreed who used which channel for what.

The recommendations followed from that diagnosis. The report called for dedicated interoperability spectrum, including channels in any new allocation. It called for common technical standards so that radios from different manufacturers would work together on those channels. And it called for planning structures to govern their use. The part I would credit most, from where I sit in 2026, is the insistence that interoperability needed governance as well as hardware. Later practice reached the same conclusion, as the article in this section on interoperability agreements describes, and PSWAC wrote it down before most of that practice existed. The one thing the report could not control was how long it would take to get interoperable equipment into every fleet. That depended on local budgets and replacement cycles, not federal spectrum policy.

Television channels 60 to 69: why the committee looked at the top of the TV band

The near-term spectrum had to come from somewhere. By the mid-1990s, the obvious candidate was the upper end of the UHF television band, channels 60 through 69, which occupy 746 to 806 MHz. The usual explanation has two parts. First, that spectrum sits immediately below the 800 MHz band where many public safety agencies already operated, so engineers who designed 800 MHz systems would find its propagation familiar, and equipment designs could plausibly be extended to cover it. Second, television was planning its transition to digital broadcasting, which was expected to pack stations into fewer channels and free the top of the band once analog broadcasting ended.

The timing problem started with that second point. Under the digital transition plan, broadcasters received a second channel for digital service while they continued broadcasting in analog. Only at the end of the transition would they give up the analog channels. Channels 60 to 69 were going to be cleared eventually, but in the meantime stations were licensed and on the air in that range in many markets. Those included many of the large metropolitan areas where public safety congestion was worst. Land mobile use near an operating television station on the same or an adjacent channel had to be restricted to protect the broadcast. Any allocation in that band therefore came with incumbents who had to leave before public safety could use it fully.

The band also attracted commercial wireless interests. Congress had authorized the FCC to assign spectrum licenses by competitive bidding in 1993, and the early auctions had shown that licenses could raise significant revenue for the Treasury. That competing interest shaped what Congress did next. The public safety allocation arrived as part of a budget bill, packaged with a larger reallocation that also produced spectrum for auction.

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997: 24 MHz, two deadlines, and an auction beside it

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997, signed on August 5, 1997, included spectrum provisions directing the FCC to reallocate the 746 to 806 MHz band. Of the band’s 60 MHz, the act assigned 24 MHz to public safety services and 36 MHz to commercial use, with the commercial licenses to be assigned by competitive bidding. The public safety portion became two 12 MHz blocks, at 764 to 776 MHz and 794 to 806 MHz, corresponding to television channels 63, 64, 68 and 69. That arrangement allowed paired channels with transmit and receive frequencies 30 MHz apart. The act also set two deadlines: the FCC had to complete the allocation by January 1, 1998, and begin assigning public safety licenses by September 30, 1998.

The act also defined what counted as a public safety service for this spectrum, in language now found in the Communications Act at 47 U.S.C. 337. In summary, a qualifying service must meet three conditions:

• Its sole or principal purpose is protecting the safety of life, health or property.
• It is provided by state or local government entities, or by nongovernmental organizations authorized by a governmental entity whose primary mission is providing such services.
• The provider does not make it commercially available to the public.

That definition is why a commercial carrier could not simply bid for the public safety block. Anyone dealing with eligibility today should read the current text of the statute and the FCC’s rules rather than rely on this summary.

Later government summaries of the 700 MHz band treat the PSWAC report as the documented basis for the public safety piece of this legislation. The near-term figures line up closely: 25 MHz recommended and 24 MHz allocated, in the band the committee had pointed to. I am not going to describe how 25 became 24 in the legislative process, because I have not traced it through the congressional record and would only be guessing. The budget context is worth stating plainly, though. The reallocation was written alongside commercial auction revenue that counted toward the bill’s deficit targets, so public safety’s gain came bundled with a spectrum sale in the same provisions.

From statute to rules: regional planning and the stations still on the air

The FCC reallocated the band at the very end of 1997 to meet the statutory deadline, adopted service rules for the public safety portion in 1998, and issued further orders after that. The rules provided for narrowband channels for voice and low-speed data and for wider channels intended for data. They also divided the spectrum by purpose:

• General use channels, assigned through regional plans
• Nationwide interoperability channels, usable by any eligible public safety licensee
• Channels licensed to the states
• A reserve

The 800 MHz model of Regional Planning Committees carried over, so a plan written in each region governs assignment of the general use channels. Channel counts and bandwidths changed in later proceedings, so I am not quoting them. Check the FCC’s current rules and your own regional plan for what applies now.

In 1999, the FCC chartered another federal advisory committee, the National Coordination Committee, to recommend technical and operational standards for the 700 MHz interoperability channels. That put into practice PSWAC’s call for common standards on interoperability spectrum. The committee’s recommendations led the FCC to adopt the Project 25 standard for narrowband voice interoperability on those channels. Because that adoption came after 1999, the details belong to the FCC’s later orders and are better read there than in my summary.

The allocation existed on paper, but in many metropolitan areas it was largely unusable for more than a decade. The Balanced Budget Act set December 31, 2006 as the end of full-power analog broadcasting. However, it included exceptions, one of which let stations in a market keep broadcasting in analog until 85 percent of television households there could receive digital signals, so the date could slip. Public safety agencies could use the band where no television station blocked them, and some did. But in the large cities whose congestion had driven the PSWAC estimate, the channels were not broadly available until full-power analog broadcasting ended in June 2009 under later legislation. I mention that later legislation only because the gap between allocation and use is the most important practical fact about the 1997 act.

Keeping 1996 separate: what PSWAC did not say about 2001 or broadband

The 1996 report predates the attacks of September 11, 2001 by five years, and it was not written in response to any single incident. It still gets folded into the post-2001 story. Part of the reason is that interoperability became a national issue after the attacks, and part is that later documents cite PSWAC as background. The 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report made its own recommendation about spectrum for public safety, but that recommendation came from a different body eight years later and rested on a different set of facts. Citing PSWAC as though it came out of the 9/11 investigations, or citing the Commission as the origin of the 700 MHz allocation, gets the sequence backwards.

The same caution applies to the later fight over the commercial D Block and to the public safety broadband network that followed. Both involve the same general band, which makes them easy to blur together with PSWAC, but they arose from proceedings and legislation in the 2000s and 2010s. PSWAC projected demand for data and video, and the 1998 rules included wider channels for data. However, the 1996 report did not propose a nationwide broadband network of the kind that later became FirstNet, and I would not credit it with one. Those developments are covered in this section’s articles on the post-2001 directives and spectrum fight and on FirstNet.

Keeping the record clean matters for a reason beyond tidiness. PSWAC’s value as evidence is that a federal advisory committee with practitioners on it documented these problems in 1996, before any of the later events people remember:

• Band fragmentation
• Proprietary systems
• The scarcity of dedicated interoperability channels
• The absence of regional governance

Cited as a post-2001 document, it loses that value, because its significance is that the problems were on paper in advance. The article in this section on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing makes a related point about findings that were already written down at the local level. PSWAC is the national-level record of the same pattern.

What to do at your agency

• Radio administrator: This month, pull the agency’s current licenses from the FCC’s Universal Licensing System and write a one-page list of every band and frequency the agency holds, so the agency’s own position in the band patchwork is on paper.
• Communications director: Request the current 700 MHz regional plan from your region’s Regional Planning Committee chair, and note which neighboring agencies you work with routinely hold 700 MHz channels under it.
• Radio shop: Check one radio of each model in the fleet against the nationwide interoperability channels the NIFOG lists for every band that model supports. Give the radio administrator a written list of any channels missing from each codeplug.
• Communications director: Add an item to the next meeting of the existing regional radio or interoperability committee: a chart showing which band each neighboring agency’s primary system uses, and which interoperability channels the agencies could actually share on a mutual aid call.
• Grants coordinator: Review the history or background section of the agency’s most recent radio grant application or capital plan. Correct any statement that dates PSWAC after 2001, merges the 25 MHz recommendation with the 24 MHz allocation, or credits the 9/11 Commission with the 700 MHz allocation.

Takeaways

• The FCC and NTIA jointly chartered PSWAC in 1995 to assess federal, state and local public safety wireless needs through 2010, and the committee delivered its final report in September 1996.
• The committee recommended about 25 MHz of new public safety spectrum in the near term, and the larger total most often cited from the report is 97.5 MHz by 2010, a figure worth checking against the report’s own breakdown.
• The report named band fragmentation, proprietary systems, the scarcity of dedicated interoperability channels, and weak planning and funding as the barriers to interoperability.
• PSWAC’s most durable point was that interoperability required dedicated channels, common standards and regional governance working together, which later practice has borne out.
• The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 directed the FCC to allocate 24 MHz between 746 and 806 MHz to public safety and 36 MHz to commercial auction, with an allocation deadline of January 1, 1998.
• Television stations still on channels 60 to 69 kept much of the public safety 700 MHz spectrum unusable in large markets until full-power analog broadcasting ended in 2009.
• PSWAC predates the 9/11 Commission’s spectrum recommendation and the D Block dispute by years, and citing it as part of the post-2001 story erases its value as an advance warning.