Spectrum Issues Continue to Drive International Telecom Policy in 2012

"Anyone who tries to deny a spectrum crunch isn’t listening to what every telecommunications leader in the world is saying,” Anstrom said. “Everyone is asking for more mobile broadband spectrum.” Anstrom is confident the U.S. is making “real progress” to satiate the demands for spectrum, but said it “will take a long time” to resolve the international issues.

Qualcomm Vice President Dean Brenner lauded FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s advocacy for more spectrum reallocation. “It’s nice to see FCC on the page of getting more spectrum,” he said. “We are experiencing what we call excessive demand.” Brenner advocated for greater spectrum sharing scenarios “on an authorized basis.” There’s “a growing consensus that we can’t just throw up our hands,” he said. “Obviously we want as much cleared up spectrum as we can get.” Government officials and industry executives discussed spectrum sharing at the CTIA conference last week. (See report below.)

Vodafone Public Policy Director Richard Feasey is less convinced about a spectrum crunch in some parts of Europe, he said. “To get anything done you have to create a crisis. … I'm always little skeptical when some of the operators in some of our smaller European countries serving a few million customers say they are really choking,” he said. “We all know we are going to need more. The question is about pacing and timing."

Anstrom noted that nearly a quarter of the ITU members are from Africa, so it should be “no surprise” that they are calling to accelerate the allocation of broadband for that continent, he said. “Anyone who underestimates the growing significance of spectrum for Africa will be missing out.” Lockheed Martin Vice President Jennifer Warren said African demand for satellite continues to grow. African regulators are “equally strong and supportive and dependent upon satellites for communications, both within the region and inter-regionally,” she said. “In this last [ITU] conference, while many of the African regulators were in global wireless spectrum groups,” another group of African regulators was “trying to preserve the group’s orbital locations for African use,” she said. “They recognize how important satellite resources are so there was there was equal appreciation of the different technologies and the spectrum that supports that.”

Comcast Vice President Rebecca Arbogast said the broadband digital divide is “still with us.” It’s “more serious because of the pervasiveness of the Internet,” she said on another panel. “It is a huge issue with kids having access to it in schools. There are still legitimate concerns.”

There should be educational exemptions to wireless data caps, said Blair Levin, the former leader of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. “What happens when we have digital textbooks? If we have data caps, we are going to blow right through those. If we don’t exempt education from those data caps, we are going to create a new digital divide.” Levin noted that “for the first time since the beginning of the commercial Internet, we do not have a national provider saying we will build a better Internet than the current Internet.” Now a fellow at the Aspen Institute and working on connecting universities and their communities to faster broadband, Levin said the lack of a national ISP trying to build a better Web will eventually lead to a “strategic bandwidth problem,” where U.S. network innovation will fall behind its foreign competitors.