CTIA marked the 15th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act on...

succession of budget bills that led to major spectrum allocations and commercial auctions, said Jot Carpenter, vice president of government affairs, on CTIA’s blog. Policymakers need to concentrate on finding more spectrum for wireless broadband, he wrote. “Cell-splitting and efficiency gains are important, but insufficient to meet the explosive demand for ubiquitous access to high-speed mobile Internet connections,” Carpenter said. “Three recent mobile traffic studies (from Cisco, Coda and the Yankee Group) suggest that mobile data traffic will increase from 2009 levels by a factor of five by the end of this year, more than 20 times by 2013 and by 35 times by 2014.” AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn observed how much the world has changed since 1996. “Your phone was only slightly smaller than your shoe,” he said in a separate blog post. “You watched movies on your VHS recorder, which had finally won the technology battle with Sony’s Betamax, although there was a new DVD technology just coming on the market. You may have finally purchased a car with a CD player but you probably still ran with a Walkman.” Quinn said the FCC’s approval of a proceeding that should reshape the Universal Service Fund is an encouraging development. “It truly is time to re-examine our communications priorities,” he said. “At AT&T, we think we should have a clear vision of where we are going. … The PSTN will ultimately go the way of the Betamax, the VHS player and the Walkman and we will understand that that is a good thing.”