That requirement could appear as an amendment to a draft digital-television bill currently scheduled for a committee vote on Thursday, said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. The existing bill calls for a "hard deadline" of April 7, 2009, by which all analog broadcasters must give up their piece of the spectrum and switch to all-digital transmission.
"Can we really afford to wait until 2009 to transfer this spectrum?" McCain said at a Tuesday morning policy event here hosted by the New America Foundation. "I don’t think so."
The impetus for moving up the deadline, McCain has maintained, is that the television channels on which analog broadcasts operate are occupying valuable spectrum that emergency workers need to communicate with each other. The government plans to allocate a chunk of the freed-up spectrum for that purpose and to auction off the rest for billions of dollars to companies eager to deploy new broadband services.
