NATO gets tough over airwaves

Date: 29/04/1999

By Peter Chapman

NATO has delivered a polite 'hands off' message to the European Commission over its bid to ensure greater coordination between EU member states when they allocate scarce radio airwaves.

The debate comes as the Commission begins to analyse the 120 responses it has received to its Green Paper on the issue, published in January.

In the document, the Commission hinted that NATO members should free up much of the 'radio spectrum' they currently control for other uses. It also suggested that the military should be forced to pay for the right to use the space it keeps. "Military tasks have decreased and they should be willing to give more of their frequencies to other uses," said one Commission radio expert.

However, NATO insists that the whole issue should be left in the hands of individual governments. "It is firmly believed that spectrum assignment and licensing should remain a purely national decision," it said in a statement.

The alliance points out that it already has an agreement with civil and defence authorities in its member countries which governs the allocation of airwaves. It adds that this Nato Joint Civil and Military Frequency Agreement (NFJA) foresees some freeing up of the airwaves thanks to the "changed military circumstances in NATO and increased civil spectrum requirements".

In addition, the alliance points out that it already cooperates with the pan-European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) to ensure that this accord works in practice.

It argues that the scope for EU governments to coordinate the way they carve up scarce airwaves is further limited by the fact that non-Union countries such as the US and Turkey are members of the alliance. However, it says its radio spectrum units would welcome working with the Commission "within this constraint".

NATO also insists that the military should be exempt from charges now being introduced by EU governments which share out spectrum between commercial rivals by, in some cases, selling it to the highest bidder. The Commission has advocated 'non-discrimination' between sectors including defence and public television channels.

A Commission official admitted the institution's hands were tied unless EU member states gave it a mandate to intervene. "There is nowhere in the treaty where we can say 'you can have this spectrum but you cannot have that'," he said.

But he argued that EU member states which also belong to NATO should still be able to work together to make the alliance's handling of the spectrum issue less secretive. "At least the way member states allocate spectrum to defence should be on the table. The way they do it at the moment is in the dark," he said.

While NATO has rebuffed the Commission initiative as too ambitious, industry has attacked it for failing to go far enough.

Neil Gibbs, spokesman for the European Public Network Operators Association (ETNO), said the Commission's paper should have done more to urge member states to open up airwaves still reserved for the military to new private sector telecoms uses.

" When it comes to military use in spectrum management we are still waiting for the peace dividend. Notwithstanding the Kosovo crisis, in most European countries the military squats on large tracts of spectrum for which it has no real need," he said.