WASHINGTON D.C.—The FCC has voted to deny a petition by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) for reconsideration of the Office of Engineering and Technology’s (OET’s) designation of Nominet UK as a white spaces database administrator.
Nominet sold its spectrum management assets to RED Technologies in 2020, including its TV white spaces database. Since Nominet is no longer a TVWS administrator, the NAB was not lobbying the FCC about its petition because it was no longer relevant.
As previously reported, the FCC had already signaled that it would deny the petition when it voted on the matter in January.
NAB’s petition had argued that Nominet’s database contained numerous errors and that Nominet should be de-certified as a database administrator until it corrected the errors.
According to the FCC, Nominet stated that the errors were a result of difficulties in importing data from the Commission’s new Licensing and Management System (LMS) and that it immediately corrected the import procedure.
In denying the petition, the FCC ruled: “We find that the database errors discovered by NAB, which were immediately corrected by Nominet, are not grounds to revoke the designation of Nominet as a white space database administrator….While we are denying NAB’s petition, we underscore that we appreciate NAB bringing these concerns to the attention of the Commission and Nominet so that the errors could be remedied. However, we do not believe that these errors show any fundamental deficiency on the part of the database administrator but appear to be the result of issues related to the Commission’s transition....the LMS combined with an inadvertent failure by Nominet to include all of the latest updates in its final version of the database. Nominet promptly recognized its ongoing responsibility for remedying concerns brought to its attention. As noted above, in 2020, Nominet transferred its database to RED Technology, and NAB did not indicate any concerns about this transfer.”
The complete ruling is available here.
