Wireless Carriers, Broadcasters Argue as Spectrum Debate Intensifies on Hill
Congress shouldn’t take on spectrum issues with a sense of crisis, as it tackles legislation in the Senate and House, NAB Associate General Counsel Scott Goodwin told the Congressional High Tech Caucus late Thursday. Cisco and Microsoft executives raised red flags about provisions reportedly in the Republican draft that could force auctions for all spectrum, including unlicensed spectrum.
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"We're not opposed to incentive auctions, we just want to make sure it’s done right,” Goodwin said. Before Congress does anything, he said it should weigh carefully the implications for the future of the nation’s communications policy. “There’s no need to panic,” he said. “There’s no run-away train coming down the tracks. We do have time to get this right.” Goodwin said the rhetoric over a spectrum shortage has changed in recent months: “We've moved from a crisis to a crunch to a capacity issue in a few select cities."
"We're happy that there’s a focus here,” said Chris Guttman-McCabe, CTIA vice president. “We've seen numbers” that demonstrate why Congress and the administration “need to focus on bringing more spectrum to market,” he said. “Every country that we compare ourselves to is.” Guttman-McCabe fired back at Goodwin. “We've always said crisis and we've said crisis because there’s not spectrum in the pipeline,” Guttman-McCabe said. “It’s not about constraints from market to market, it’s about a significant limiting effect throughout the entirety of the country.”
Mary Brown, Cisco director of government affairs, cited the latest wireless projections from her company’s annual report. “What is happening here?” she said. “We're getting a lot more devices. We're getting smartphones. We're getting tablets.” Video is fueling the growth, she said. “We're going to be communicating using a lot more video in the future. … You're going to be watching it in the Internet. You're going to be downloading it. You're going to be uploading it."
The FCC has urged that the U.S. identify 275 MHz for wireless broadband by 2015, and that number is probably too conservative, Brown said. “If we don’t, what will happen is networks will become congested.” Brown said the key to successful incentive auctions is “flexibility” and auctions really must be “entirely voluntary.” Broadcasters who opt not to sell their spectrum must be repacked. “We think that the broadcasting industry emerges from this next transition in a very healthy state,” she said. “We are still going to have a vibrant broadcasting industry through the United States. This transition doesn’t end that."
Brown and Paula Boyd, regulatory counsel at Microsoft, raised concerns that language in the Republican draft would force the FCC to sell all spectrum made available for any use, including unlicensed. “That absolutely upends our business model,” Brown said. “We don’t see a path forward to device manufacturers purchasing spectrum at an auction for Wi-Fi.” Boyd said, “We don’t see the business model. We don’t see who would participate in such an auction."
Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., co-chair of the task force, is optimistic about the outlook for spectrum legislation in the current Congress, despite the many challenges, she told us. “When you think about everything that’s going on, we're not going to have enough spectrum in 2014 with all the innovation that’s going on, with all the new devices, we're using up all the spectrum right now,” Matsui said. “And I think this is a timely moment to do this. We have to do something with the public safety aspect. We've been really lucky the last 10 years [since the Sept. 11 attacks], but you can’t just live on luck.”