AICC Report

Defi ning the Cellular Sunset

A simple expression that is plaguing our industry (again)

By Lou Fiore, Chairman, AICC

If you are not interested in protecting your ability to communicate, don’t bother reading this.

In this issue of the TMA Dispatch, I would AGAIN like to beat an old drum. Much of this below you have probably already read. I am compelled to try again anyway.

Since 1969, listed alarm companies have enjoyed the exclusive use of a portion of the 450 to 470 MHz business band for alarm usage, both voice and data. In recent years, voice usage on these frequencies has fallen off dramatically because of the transition to commercial cellular networks. In recent months, with a very large portion of the US workforce working at home, use of the Internet and commercial cellular have been overloaded. With people going on-line to a much greater extent in the pandemic, Internet traffi c has exploded. That is taking a toll on our download speeds and video quality. Besides increased cellular traffi c, one alternative is to use the hotspot feature on many smart phones, further stressing the cellular networks.

While these frequencies have been coveted by other industries, seeking to use them for trunked radio systems, TMA still retains the ability to coordinate a certain group of frequencies between 460 and 466 MHz. But we no longer have the exclusive use. We must now share these frequencies with others on a non-interfering co-channel basis.

We are now seeing high-powered trucking systems using our unused voice channels. We are powerless to stop this, since they are legally allowed to be coordinated on these frequencies. The result is an increase in adjacent channel interference from these high powered trucking systems to our offset frequencies. Adjacent channel interference from a high-powered neighbor is often diffi cult, if not impossible to mitigate.

For alarm companies, the coordination process will yield an FCC license for your company to operate on these frequencies. After licensing, there is then a one-year construction requirement to build out a system. In this frequency band there are numerous channels that can be licensed. The low power channels between the high power channels (the so-called “offsets”) are typically used for alarm data transmission by systems such as AES-Intellinet. But the high power channels, spaced 5 MHz apart for repeater use, are there to be used for voice as well as data. A few of you have found them useful for fi re testing, where a couple of your employees can easily communicate with each other inside a building.

These voice channels have been used for decades by central station companies wishing to communicate with its fi eld personnel such as sales, installers, service, runners, guards, etc. Slowly, over the years, this function has been replaced by the use of cellular telephones. Our lack of use of these voice channels have been noted by others and an appeal to the FCC by other coordinators left us in the current situation of having to share these frequencies.

With recent episodes showing the vulnerability of the cellular networks, it is still within easy reach of alarm companies to create an alternate communication network, if for no other continued on page 27