FCC Commissioners See CES Visit as Critical Part of Their Year
LAS VEGAS -- Attendance at CES has become an annual ritual for most FCC commissioners, who fly in to spend hours walking the ever-massive show floor and to hold sometimes back-to-back meetings with other attendees. The commission even had a small booth on the CES floor, where staff gave away FCC Frisbees and plastic Slinkys, along with handouts with basic information about the agency. Most of Chairman Julius Genachowski’s aides made the trip, as did other top officials from the Wireless and Consumer and Government Affairs bureaus and the Office of Engineering and Technology.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Genachowski made a whirlwind tour of the CES floor, walking at the speed of a forced march between booths selected for his viewing. He was accompanied by an entourage including soon-to-be Chief of Staff Zac Katz; Amy Levine, his wireless aide; aide Josh Gottheimer; and, for most of the trip, OET Chief Julius Knapp.
Genachowski was shown 3D TV at LG’s massive booth, though he left before Thursday afternoon’s ESPN 3D card of professional fights on the show floor. He viewed Dish Network’s new whole-house DVR, the Hopper, with its 2 TB hard drive and capacity to record up to six HD programs at the same time. Genachowski was shown LG’s new digital refrigerator, which can keep track of when a gallon of milk will go bad and chill a bottle of wine in minutes. “Cool,” he said.
Walking quickly to a second CES hall, Genachowski toured a series of booths tied to education and health, two themes of the FCC National Broadband Plan. At the Thuze booth he looked at a new generation of digital textbooks. Some students “are very against having a digital text” and “some love it,” a booth worker explained. As aides looked on, Genachowski took off his suit jacket, handed Levine his reading glasses, and was strapped into a Nordic skiing simulator for a test race. Pumping hard, Genachowski went a simulated 200 meters in 66.8 seconds, 24.7 seconds off the record, but a respectable showing.
Commissioner Robert McDowell, who traveled alone to CES, said he was accompanied by a C-SPAN camera on his official tour of the show floor. McDowell told us he has been at CES for six years in a row, throughout his tenure on the FCC. “More and more devices being exhibited at CES are wireless and it underscores the need for accessibility to unlicensed wireless spectrum,” McDowell said. “That’s the big take way. But it also underscores the need for policies that will help encourage spectral efficiency because every household in America in 10 years or so will be crammed with devices that will be communicating with each other and their owners and other entities, maybe, across the globe wirelessly. We need to be thinking about what can we do to help that make it happen faster.”
McDowell said he views attendance at CES as a critical part of his year. “It’s really important to see what engineers are designing, what products are coming over the horizon, and then, from year to year, what products didn’t make it and then ask why,” he said. “It’s a chance for me to ask engineers, and marketers and product designers a lot of detailed questions … all within a concentrated period of time. I always have several takeaways, I learn something new each time."
"Thin is in,” was Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s main takeaway. “You see thin phones. You see thin televisions. All of these things may be bigger, but they take up less space.” Clyburn said she likes to see the new devices on the floor. “But it’s about the programs,” she said. “It’s about the software. It’s about the use.” Clyburn was pleased to see devices that will promote distance learning. “There’s a lot of hope on that floor,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where you live. I'm not going to say it doesn’t matter how much money you make, because that’s still a barrier. It doesn’t matter what your limitation, be it physical … there is something to enhance your experience here."
One type of device commissioners didn’t see on the show floor were any capable of accessing the TV white spaces. Genachowski discussed the white spaces during his remarks Wednesday and OET recently licensed the first device -- by Koos Technical Services. The device was in Las Vegas for private demonstrations but not part of any display on the show floor, an FCC official told us.