Stearns Questions Whether DOD Has Excess Spectrum
The U.S. already faces a “spectrum crunch” and “we should be doing something about it,” Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said Wednesday at a Roll Call forum. Stearns said the next critical step is an inventory, especially of spectrum used by the Department of Defense. Stearns is chairman of the Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
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Stearns said he has called in DOD officials to discuss whether the military has excess spectrum that could be used for wireless broadband. “They don’t want to budge, but I don’t have any kind of influence or leverage on them because I have no inventory,” he said. “I think the military obviously has a lot of spectrum.”
Stearns questioned why the U.S. allocated $7.5 billion for broadband deployment as part of a massive stimulus bill two years ago without first doing an inventory of what areas of the country are the most underserved. The U.S. shouldn’t make the same mistake in spectrum and needs to complete a spectrum inventory to look at real needs, he said. “If we're going to understand the problem and tackle it … we should also see what is the spectrum allocation, who has it, what does the military have?” Stearns said.
Stearns cited a recent report that ranked the U.S. as the number 18 nation in the world for broadband speeds. “It’s really a little bit embarrassing … that we have as a country allowed this to occur,” he said. “We discovered the Internet. Here we are, 18th in speeds, in downloading and file sharing.” Stearns said he will support the spectrum bill slated for markup in the Commerce Committee Thursday. “The bill is basically a compromise,” he said. He predicted that committee Democrats will propose a large number of amendments addressing the reallocation of the 700 MHz D-block to public safety. Democrats “want to see the D-block just simply given away,” he said.
Stearns conceded that getting more spectrum in the pipeline through auctions will take time. “The FCC is going to move slow, no matter what,” he said. “Setting even the rules for auctions sometimes takes a long time and they're controversial.” An inventory is also important to setting up auctions, he said. “If you don’t know what’s in the closet, how do you know what to buy?” he asked.
Incentive auction legislation introduced by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., Tuesday is an important “benchmark” that should help get a bill through Congress (CD Nov 30 p4), said former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. “For the first time the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on a bipartisan basis, now seems to be unified with the same position dealing with D-block that the Senate has taken and that the administration has taken and that is that should be allocated to public safety.” Boucher said last year when he chaired the communications subcommittee there was in general agreement that the D-block should be auctioned. But that was before the Senate and administration weighed in, he said. “The world has changed a lot during the course of the last nine months,” he said. “In the absence of some accommodation, either House, Senate or administration, on this subject, it’s difficult to see how incentive auction legislation would have moved forward."
Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said the spectrum crunch is comparable to the energy crisis. “If you take everybody’s behavior and keep it exactly the same and project it out and don’t change any variables then, yeah, you are going to run into problems,” Feld said. “Like the energy crisis it’s going to take a lot of different approaches.” Policymakers need to think carefully about unlicensed versus licensed spectrum, what traffic should go on each and at how to both share and reallocate federal spectrum, he said.
The rise in the use of smartphones and other wireless devices in the U.S. “is creating a traffic jam in the available spectrum, and maybe even a crisis,” said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of LightSquared. “There are infinite possibilities that are ahead for America and all of Americans if we get this right,” he said. “Building the infrastructure of the future is something we in America know how to do and how to do it well.”
LightSquared has already signed on 28 companies that hope to use the company’s spectrum “and we don’t even have a network yet,” Ahuja said. Most are small and medium sized businesses, he said. “What we are hearing from them is that a business model like LightSquared is critical to their efforts to bring affordable wireless service to both underserved rural areas and overwhelmed urban markets.”