The PCIA Legacy: We Build Industries
The Personal Communications Industry Association has a distinguished history of helping build the industries that comprise the wireless telecommunications sector. From our beginnings in land mobile radio to paging and messaging, and from personal communications services (PCS) to tower and antenna siting, PCIA has been instrumental in facilitating the emergence and growth of core wireless services. We do this by providing our members with the expertise and support to address the regulatory, marketplace and technical issues that have the highest impact on their businesses.
The Evolution of an Industry: Tower and Antenna Siting
The backbone of wireless communications, the tower and antenna siting industry — or wireless infrastructure industry — is one of the most vital sectors of telecom today. Towers and antennas are essential to the formation of the carrier networks that transmit voice and data. They are, therefore, fundamental to the growth of all wireless communications.
When the wireless industry was still in its early stages of development, telecom carriers built and managed their own network infrastructure. As the wireless communications industry flourished, it also became more intricate. In the mid-1990s, the carriers found that dealing with numerous federal, state and local regulations was becoming too burdensome and realized it was more cost effective to sell their portfolios to the tower owners and managers — new entrepreneurs who were ready and willing to take on the increasingly complex tower business. It was then that erecting and maintaining the infrastructure to support wireless communications became a business unto itself.
Acting on behalf of our carrier members, PCIA took the first actions for the tower and site owners in the late 1980s by founding the Site Owners and Managers Alliance (SOMA). Through leveraging our experience and contacts with the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, we were successful in assuring fair regulations to tower owners surrounding siting fees.
Today, PCIA navigates the issues that affect the infrastructure industry companies themselves, as well as those that affect their customers — wireless carriers — and ultimately, the end user. By working with governmental agencies such as the FCC, FAA, EPA, ACHP as well as other regulatory entities, PCIA ensures that the tower industry has a voice in Washington on infrastructure siting issues. PCIA has helped its members to organize and establish their own independent industry sector from the ground up and is dedicated to its continuing growth and advancement.
A Critical Part of Wireless Efficiency: Spectrum Solutions
As demand for spectrum that seeks a broad base of uses increases, PCIA has responded to the evolving needs of the industry through an array of spectrum management solutions, including Frequency Coordination services and the PCIA Microwave Clearinghouse.
Working in collaboration with customers, the PCIA frequency coordination team skillfully designs customized solutions to meet individual licensing and coordination needs. With more than 1,000,000 licensed stations authorized to offer services representing myriad industries — from truck dispatching to pizza delivery, hospitals to schools, and governments to corporations — the need for fast, accurate, and efficient coordination of radio frequency license applications is imperative.
As an FCC-certified frequency advisory committee, PCIA continues to dominate the frequency coordination market in the business and industrial radio service on frequency assignments allocated between 30-900 MHz. To date, PCIA has coordinated more of the nation’s business and industrial spectrum than any other coordinating entity.
Since its authorization by the FCC in 1996, the non-profit PCIA Microwave Clearinghouse has worked with all the major PCS carriers to establish a world-class cost-sharing mechanism for the relocation of microwave links. Representatives from Australia, Canada, France, Taiwan and Japan have studied the PCIA Microwave Clearinghouse operation so that they may establish similar processes in their respective countries.
Having registered more than 3,000 relocated links and nearly 200,000 base stations, the PCIA Microwave Clearinghouse has helped the PCS industry identify more than $250,000,000 in cost-sharing revenue. Because of PCIA’s leadership and unwavering commitment to fairness and confidentiality, the PCIA Microwave Clearinghouse is regarded by the FCC and the PCS community as a prime example of effective industry self-regulation.
