FCC Forum Examines How to Get the Poor Online

“Mobile will be an important part of the solution to broadband,” Genachowski said. “We spent time yesterday walking around the CTIA floor, and we saw some very impressive broadband applications around health care and energy. You can start to see tangibly the way that high- speed Internet access and the creativity of developers are starting to change the world.”

One-Economy CEO Rey Ramsey said one way of getting more of the poor to subscribe to broadband is by offering applications that help them in their daily lives. But the message on broadband can’t be, “Here it is,” he said. “If you look at those who are not connected and you look at central activities in their lives, one of the things they're all connected to is government,” Ramsey said. “The areas of government they're all connected to in one way or another [are] both the health system and the financial benefits system.”

Ramsey referred to a photo of people waiting in line in Detroit to apply for housing and energy assistance. “We need to have an online not an in-line mentality when it comes to the poor,” he said. “When a mayor will say to me, ‘Come to our city, bring your program,’ I say to the mayor, respectfully, ‘Tell me the problem you are trying to solve and we'll focus on what a 21st century solution ought to be.'”

Genachowski said in response: “It makes me think about the following healthy progression I think we've seen on the Internet and I'm hoping we're seeing in mobile, too. Applications get developed for commercial reasons. … Then social innovators will take all that work and say, ‘Now, let’s think about social spinoffs for these platforms, tools, technologies that have been developed for commercial reasons and connect them to health, connect them to education.'”

Genachowski asked how the government might accelerate progress. “I would ask you to keep thinking whether as part of what we do there are ways to incentivize the more rapid transition to social spinoffs?” He asked whether it would help to have a government “clearinghouse of best practices” in various cities. “I find as I go around the country and talk to different people, there’s not a lot of shared information.”

Another panel took up spectrum for broadband, asking whether the U.S. faces a “looming crisis.” “Our broadband team has been hard at work now for a couple of weeks,” Genachowski said. “We've learned enough to know that there is a real challenge out there.” He added, “It’s going to require real creativity and a lot of dialogue to figure out how we tackle this.”

Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm’s executive vice president for the Americas and India, said that her company sells technology and equipment for licensed and unlicensed use, but the great need will be for more licensed spectrum. “If you try to cover a wide area with unlicensed spectrum technology, you need many, many transmitters because of the short range of the devices,” Johnson said. “For both technical and economic reasons, it’s really not feasible to rely on only unlicensed spectrum to satisfy this exponential growth in data that we're hearing about this morning.”

Johnson noted that no large businesses use unlicensed spectrum to reach a broad audience. “There is really no business case for a wide-area unlicensed service because it needs 20 times the transmitters,” she said.

Almost half of low-cost provider Leap’s wireless broadband subscribers had never had Internet service, said Egil Gronstad, vice president of technology planning. “They have had no DSL, no cable and no dialup,” Gronstad said. “This is their first experience being connected to the Internet.” The big challenge that Leap faces is adding spectrum as its customer base grows, he said. “In particular we believe that spectrum must be made available to smaller and midsized carriers to enable us to provide affordable broadband service to underserved communities.”

The FCC shouldn’t be concerned about spectrum solely because of growth in mobile broadband, said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge. “Wireless remains the most cost-effective and fastest way to bring broadband access to rural residents,” Sohn said. “A substantial obstacle small and local providers face in attempting to expand and improve their networks is additional spectrum.” Sohn predicted that government agencies will be reluctant to give up their spectrum and the best alternative is public-private sharing. She added that unlicensed also will play a critical role and should keep getting attention at the FCC.

Victor Bahl, principal researcher at Microsoft’s networking research group, said unlicensed spectrum is critical to development of new applications. “The proof is in the pudding if you look at Wi-Fi and see how many innovations have happened,” Bahl said. “If you think about OFDM, which is now the cornerstone of LTE, or WiMAX, or all the new technologies that really got initiated in Wi-Fi first … there are many, many things that happened in the unlicensed band that allowed innovation to happen and then moved forward to the licensed band.”

“I love the mobile. It’s totally cool. It’s great,” said Matthew Rantanen, director of technology at the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association. “Keep doing what you do in the mobile arena, but don’t forget that in rural America and tribal rural America fixed wireless, unlicensed is the solution that is conquering that digital divide. It is the only thing that is cost effective for our people, meaning tribal people, to deliver services to reservations that are rural and remote and cut off from a lot of resources.”

Rantanen said for the 19 federally recognized tribes in San Diego County, “The killer app, if you will, is the Internet. They don’t have the Internet. They don’t have phones.” He noted that his association can’t use much of the spectrum being made available for unlicensed use. Rantanen said he was a strong advocate of the FCC’s TV white spaces order but then found out that half of the reservations in the county are in a Mexican-border exclusion zone. He also supported unlicensed use of 3650 MHz spectrum, but then found out that band also won’t be usable because of the large number of military air bases in the county. “That freed-up, unlicensed bandwidth, is not really freed up for all of us in this country,” he said.

Larry Landis, an Indiana state commissioner, said at the start of the discussion that the FCC was right to take its investigations on the road. “It will bring a much richer record to the whole process,” he said. “We need to focus primarily on three groups: The least, the last and the lost. The least are those who have modest incomes, few personal resources and even less discretionary income. The last, those who are at the outer limits of technology or perhaps even beyond the reach of current technology and the lost, those to whom the value proposition simply hasn’t been communicated yet.”

Another subject of Thursday’s forum was broadband for public safety. Barbara Montgomery, project manager for the Automated Regional Justice Information System, said in response to a question from Genachowski that officers already carry radios and often personal and department cellphones. “We're talking about spectrum limitations,” she said. “When you're talking to police officers one of the limitations is literally the space on their belt that they're wearing everyday. We can’t give these guys very much more gear, because they're already pretty maxed out.”