Agreement Reached on Shared Use of Flight Test Band
A deal was struck that would allow deployment of body sensor networks operating on a secondary basis in the 2360-2390 MHz band, the Aerospace & Flight Test Radio Coordinating Council, Philips Healthcare and GE Healthcare announced Tuesday. They worked out an agreement on sharing of the band between primary aeronautical mobile telemetry and medical networks, and presented the deal to FCC officials last week, said an ex parte filing.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The agreement follows “15 months of discussion, analyses, and negotiation,” the filing said. “The proposal employs a combination of propagation prediction methods, traditional coordination registration and unique electronic key and beacon approaches that together would enable reliable sharing” of the band, it said.
GEHC said in a 2008 filing that use of the technology would help hospitals eliminate “the tangle of sensor cables and wires that today act to tether most patients to their monitors.” Philips has found that wireless monitoring, which allows patients to move around and exercise after a procedure, helps improve patient care and leads to better results, said an attorney involved in the discussions. “Finding the spectrum for all these little transmitters … has been very difficult,” the lawyer said.
The band is used by agencies including DOD and NASA to collect real-time data as aircraft are put through intense flight tests. Engineers on the ground can wirelessly monitor stress gauges on wings, oil pressure, temperature readings and a host of other data points. The coordinating council’s support is subject to review and approval of the details by officials with the government flight test agencies and NTIA, the ex parte filing said.
Parties rarely have been able to work out an agreement on spectrum issues as contentious as those here, said another attorney involved in the negotiations. “In an era when spectrum access is becoming more and more difficult and … the commission is forced to squeeze more services into a smaller and smaller amount of spectrum I think we're probably going to have to rely on these types of arrangements more in the future,” the attorney said. “We do think this is a major breakthrough. A lot of work was put into this over the last several months.”