FCC sets up a $400,000-a-year panel to pick who runs public safety’s 4.9 GHz band

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission has formally announced a federal advisory committee to recommend who should manage the 4.9 GHz band, a slice of spectrum reserved for police, fire and other public-safety agencies that a federal appeals court this summer called “persistently underutilized.”

The notice, published Wednesday in the Federal Register, puts the committee’s estimated annual operating cost at $406,822.44: $350,709 for the salaries of two full-time FCC employees and $56,113.44 in other internal costs. Members, at least seven of them, will not be paid or reimbursed for travel. The committee will last no more than a year. Brian Marenco of the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is the designated federal officer.

The job at stake

Under the commission’s Eighth Report and Order, adopted in 2024, a single Band Manager will be eligible to apply for a nationwide overlay license covering 4940 to 4990 megahertz and to coordinate how the band is used. The order also authorized the Band Manager to enter into a sharing agreement with the First Responder Network Authority, or FirstNet, the federal body that oversees the public-safety broadband network AT&T built and operates under contract.

That arrangement has been contested. On July 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected challenges from both directions. Judge Gregory Katsas, writing for a panel that included Judges Robert Wilkins and Neomi Rao, held that the Public Safety Spectrum Alliance and the Public Safety Broadband Technology Association, which argued the FCC had not gone far enough, lacked standing. Claims by the Coalition for Emergency Response and Critical Infrastructure and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, which argued the commission had gone too far in restricting incumbent licensees, were denied on the merits or dismissed as unripe.

Ground rules for the committee

The FCC’s public safety and wireless bureaus laid out the process in a Sept. 28 public notice. Nominations for members and a chair are due Oct. 28; the bureaus aim to establish the committee by Dec. 28 and hold its first meeting in January 2027. “Any individual or organization that is chosen to be a member of the Committee will be ineligible to serve as the Band Manager,” the notice says.

The bureaus also fenced off the policy fights. The committee “will not reconsider issues resolved in the Eighth Report and Order,” the notice says, nor matters pending before the commission in a further rulemaking, and it should avoid “prejudging or committing the Band Manager to obligations or outcomes” beyond the FCC’s rules. Urgent Communications first reported the notice’s details.

The notice does not say which organizations will be invited to serve. The FCC’s earlier Seventh Report and Order envisioned a selection committee that “represents and ensures the involvement of the relevant stakeholders, in particular the public safety community,” the Federal Register notice says.

Requests for comment

The Inquisitor is seeking comment from the FCC, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, the Public Safety Spectrum Alliance, the FirstNet Authority and the Coalition for Emergency Response and Critical Infrastructure, and will update this story with their responses.

Photo: A portable firefighter radio instrumented for testing. National Institute of Standards and Technology photo, public domain.