Nebraska Commissioner Says CTIA Misleading Consumers with Wireless Tax Complaints

"You have confused the consumers,” Boyle told Guttman-McCabe. “When they look at their phone bill they look at taxes and fees and they don’t even realize that all the fees that are collected in some way or another go back to the industry.” Boyle said many never complained about wireless taxes until CTIA raised taxes as an issue. “You really cannot argue that you have suffered because consumers are not buying your product,” she said. “You are doing very, very well and you are taking some of the landlines out of business.”

Consumers face taxes of 20 percent or more in many areas of the country for wireless, Guttman-McCabe said. Wireless carriers have been a victim of their own success, he suggested. “We've been very good at collecting and remitting,” he said. “We see a lot of municipalities and others, and states, sort of looking at us directly to perform that role, but it has a direct impact on our consumers.” Most consumers have only limited money to spend, Guttman-McCabe said. “When you tax them at 17, 18, 19, 20 or more percent you are taking money that they could otherwise use for something else."

Vermont Public Service Board Commissioner John Burke said wireless carriers complain about the need for a “quicker, easier, more friendly” process for siting cell towers. “But then at the end of all of that you also say, ‘But don’t tax us too much,'” Burke said. If policymakers are going to be “technologically neutral,” he asked, “Why shouldn’t we be concerned about the industry … paying their way as they move forward with the spectrum that you're asking [for] and the siting that you're asking to open up?"

Meanwhile, Dinesh Gopalakrishan, senior economist with the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable, questioned whether a spectrum crisis is imminent. A shortage is likely, Gopalakrishan said. “The first thing before us is what timeframe are we talking about,” he said. “Is it going to happen in the next two or three years or is it going to take much longer?"

Technology and spectrum are not “static” and industry can use the spectrum it has more efficiently, Gopalakrishan said. Wi-Fi will be able to handle part of the load on wireless networks and 4G uses spectrum twice as efficiently as 3G, he said. “You can use the spectrum more effectively and postpone the inevitable,” he said. “We need to remember technology is not static and things change.”

But Verizon Vice President Charla Rath said it takes nine to 13 years to get new spectrum into the hands of carriers. “It’s important that we start talking about a crisis now so that we're not really in a crisis when it comes time we need the spectrum,” she said. Many of the projections that show a crisis looming already take into account increasing spectral efficiency and the likelihood that more of the wireless load will be handed off to Wi-Fi, Rath said.

There’s no vacant spectrum available in the ranges of the most use to carriers, said Steve Sharkey, director technology policy at T-Mobile. “All of it is being used by somebody and it is a long process to make that available,” Sharkey said.

Congress and the administration need to move forward on getting the FCC the authority it needs to hold voluntary incentive auctions of broadcast spectrum, said Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future. “We need to stop playing games,” he said. “It can take seven to 10 years to put any new spectrum into not only the pipeline but into commercial deployment. We don’t have time to waste.”