Another complication for the roll-out of AIS was that AIS2 was being used by other US Federal Agencies.
To accommodate these circumstances, USCG played a major role in setting standards for AIS capabilities. USCG forced the international standard setting organizations (IMO, ITU, IALA and IEC) to require AIS to be able to use channels other than AIS1 and AIS2 and to require that AIS be backwards compatible with an earlier version of the AIS standard that uses VHF Channel 70 to tell an AIS transponder to switch to different channels. The international community vehemently opposed these requirements because it made AIS much more complex and expensive than it needed to be. USCG prevailed though and now ‘frequency agility’ is part of the AIS standard.
USCG was able to resolve the AIS2 availability through internal US Government negotiations, but AIS1 availability remained a problem.
FCC, realizing that two marine mobile channels would be needed for AIS, required the winner of the auction of the 9 marine mobile frequency bands (MariTEL) to negotiate with USCG to accommodate AIS’ needs. FCC indicated that, if MariTEL and USCG were unable to come to terms, it would ‘re-visit’ the issue. "
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