10_The_Future_Of_Spectrum_Policymaking

Joly MacFie13min

Umair Javed

00:03

All right. Hey, everyone. So I've got a few minutes here today, and I want to use it to talk about a simple plan to get American spectrum policies moving again. For years, the United States have led the world and free up spectrum for wireless tech, and airlines and improved tremendously because of it. But lately, we've slowed down. In some ways we've stopped entirely. We've even watched as other countries have moved ahead. And why is that if you ask most people, they will say things like, well, all the low hanging fruit has been plucked, there are no more easy spectrum decisions in the United States anymore. There's just so much use, we have to accept tighter times. And this line of thinking, what it's really doing is it's pitting our national priorities against each other. So you've got economic growth being pitted against national security, and this idea that it's one or the other. Why didn't we, I think a lot about something that Tim Berners Lee said, actually, many, many years ago. He was talking about the Internet. He's talking about all the success, it had achieved all the problems it was facing. And he said, The future is still so much bigger than the past. And I believe that. I think that's true for wireless as well, I think that our best days can still be ahead of us.

Umair Javed

01:23

If you consider that we have a little bit of momentum to build from, then I think the path forward starts to [inaudible]. Late last year, the Administration released a national spectrum strategy, it targets two bands, to get the United States back on track when it comes to spectrum policy. And that's the lower 3 gigahertz band and the 7 and 8 gigahertz band. And we'll talk more about those. Now, these might not be low hanging fruit in the United States. But I do think that they are worthwhile opportunities. And it's really in order that we get these bands right. But before we get to that, I want to talk about what's at stake when we think about United States spectrum policies. And right now, we're sort of just at this beginning stage of realizing the benefits that come from investing in new technologies, like 5G.

Umair Javed

02:14

If you look at it 5G has accomplished in three years, what 4G did in five. And that's more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide. It's available on more than 265 commercial networks, there have been over 2000 devices launched, 40%, of which cost over $200 There are hundreds of fixed wireless access projects, and 1000s of enterprise 5G projects deployed around the world, it's a lot of really, really good progress. If you look at the United States alone, what you see is that wireless carriers in the US have invested $39 billion at the last year alone in this technology. If you go back to 2018, when this 5G was first launched, that number becomes 160 billiondollarss. And that's important because it represents one of the largest technology investments to upgrade our nation's technology base in history.

Umair Javed

03:10

And those investments are starting to pay off. Last year, we saw a 42% increase in the wireless speeds available in the United States. And that's because the mid band spectrum that's come online. We saw a 40% year over year increase in the amount of data traffic that's being carried on American wireless network. That, again, is the largest growth in a single year that the industry has seen. It's a lot of activity. And I want to emphasize something here, all of this growth is thanks to full power licensed spectrum that feeds America's wireless networks. There's no other spectrum access model that's driving this kind of investment, or this [inaudible], or that's bringing the benefits of new technologies to more Americans. Of course, the killer by the use case right out, [inaudible] for one, is fix wireless access or 5G to the home. It's bringing real competition to the broadband marketplace for the first time. It's also helping to close the digital divide. About 20% of 5G gross adds are first timers to the broadband marketplace entirely. I mean, they didn't have broadband before. So let's look at, say, when we're talking about spectrum policy.

Umair Javed

04:32

Now before I was at CTIA, I was at the FCC. And I've told this story before but if you walked into my office at the FCC, there was only one thing hanging on my wall and it was a breath. And on that x axis of the graph was time measured in years and on the y axis was the amount of traffic that was going over our wireless networks. And in the middle of that graph was a very recognizable hockey stick, right? I'm sure you're all picturing it right? And if you took the handle of that hockey stick and projected it out, what you saw was that eventually we run out of capacity, we can't keep up with all of that growth. And when we projected out, what we see is that American wireless networks, they need access to about 1500 megahertz of additional licensed spectrum over the next 10 years in order to keep up with demands. [inaudible] an capacity angle, but you can also see it from two other angles as well. And the first is what I like to call the Keeping Up with the Joneses. What's the rest of the world doing? Well, if you look globally, the United States is trailing other countries when it comes to mid band spectrum availability. So analysis based on this report by a year ago, and they looked across the world, and what they found is that our economic peers, our global rivals had access to about 44% more spectrum than the United States did. What's more, it's we're starting 2024 even further behind on that metric. And that's because, back in December, about 164 countries gathered together at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai, to talk about how they were going to use spectrum. And a lot of those countries left that conference with the potential for another 700 megahertz on top of that, that's not available in the United States.

Umair Javed

06:12

So we're behind, we're also out of bounds. Again, if you zoom in on a critical mid band [inaudible], and this is really important spectrum, because it's got those technical characteristics that make it really good for 5G service, it can cover a large area, you get that propagation, it has a lot of capacity. So you get this so it's important to control. What you see in that range is that the federal government is the biggest season. And after that, unlicensed and shared spectrum, eclipses license spectrum, by about fourfold. Even if you go higher in the spectrum chart and millimeter wave, the [inaudible], what this means is that the United States right now is leading the world when it comes to licensed and unlicensed spectrum. But we're trailing the world when it comes to [inaudible] spectrum availability. So why does this matter? It matters because for the first time, we are facing a credible and well resourced threat to our wireless leadership. And let me take a quick aside here and, you know, talk about some of the discussions that we were having in the US government, when we talked about spectrum policy, what we saw was, or at least what I saw was, this view that in the United States, our national power will come from our military holding on to spectrum assets. When you looked at other countries, she looked at governments that [inaudible] government, they were taking a different view, their view was that national power would come from the success of their commercial technologies and their ability to proliferate them around the world. He had these two kinds of different paths. But what it meant was that they will mobilize. And so far the United States has yet to make any spectrum available for 5G that comes close, in scale or scope, to that of the Chinese government. That's a metric I think that we need to keep an eye on.

Umair Javed

07:58

I don't think that we can see our spectral leadership, or cede our technology leadership, and hope to sustain our military edge, right. So these these are things where we have to find those win-win opportunities. So I promised a plan, what does that look like? Well, it's got three parts. First, I think we need to restore the tried and true spectrum policies that have made the United States the world leader in the past. Second, I think we need to reaffirm experts and signed space policy and game when it comes to spectrum. And third, we need to reinvigorate our alliances and our partnerships around the world. I think if we can be [inaudible] and start to get back on track. So what does that look like? First restore the tried and true spectrum policies, no surprises here, we need Congress to restore the FCC's auction authority. And when it does, so we need it to provide that predictable pipeline of spectrum to support commercial innovation. This is table stakes. But we also need to restore what I talked about earlier, we need to restore that full power license spectrum opportunity back into our regulatory [inaudible]. Because it hasn't been taken out, we saw taken out in the process to study the lower 3 gigahertz standard, where that option wasn't even considered. That option has really traded the win-win opportunities that we need in this country right now. With it, we've been able to upgrade military systems, we've been able to grow our economy. We've even been able to fund the public infrastructure projects that this century surely needs. And an example of that is FirstNet, defined the very first public safety network in the United States. And so it was an important tool to have in our toolbox that we need to get back into our spectrum policymaking discussions.

Unknown Speaker

09:50

Number two, we need to reaffirm experts and science based policymaking. This is a simple concept when you put an incumbent who has a vested interest in the outcome in charge of a spectrum study, credibility suffers. It doesn't matter who the incumbent, its credibility suffers. And so we need to put the experts back in charge of that process. And what does that look like? It looks like NTIA taking charge of spectrum studies in this country again, it's not only good policy, it's required in President Biden's presidential memorandum. If you read it, what he says is NTIA speaks for the executive branch when it comes to spectrum, that if you're a federal agency, and you're going to do a spectrum study, you've got to go to NTIA. First, you have to share your modeling your assumptions, your methodology, and you got to share the data. I think we've got to get meaning to those words, we now have to carry that through and put NTIA back in charge of the spectrum studies that are planned over the next two years. And number three is reinvigorate our alliances around the world. Last week, etc. put out a paper. And what that paper concluded was that there's about $200 billion in economic benefit. That's at risk if the United States can't find a way to work with its allies and work with its partners on how it uses spectrum. If it can harmonize our use, that's what's at risk. What we know is when we do harmonize our use in that way, not only does it yield economies of scale, it also means less reliance around the world on the technologies of our adversaries. And so that's national security benefit that comes from that as well.

Unknown Speaker

11:25

So, to pull this all together. What does it look like in terms of a path forward? I'd mentioned that the National spectrum strategy targets the lower 3 gigahertz and a 7 and 8 gigahertz bands, we do need to get those bands right. There's not a lot of safety margin in that national spectrum strategy, it only has those two opportunities in the near term. So I think that the opportunity to do that is it in the implementation plan that NTIA will develop for March. So if we look at the lower 3 gigahertz band first, it's a globally harmonized band. It's been identified by Congress for commercial opportunity. The DoD already accommodates low power 5G systems in that band in other countries, all of the pieces are there, the United States should now do what the rest of the world has already figured out and prioritize both national security and economic growth in that band. And the way you can do that is by looking at opportunities to segment the band and provide either a full path, or licensed opportunity in that 3.3 to 345 gigahertz range. The second band the 7 and 8 gigahertz channel, this one's a little bit different. This is an opportunity now for the United States actually lead in the development of a new globally harmonized 5G band. This band was targeted by the ITU as a future harmonization target, it means the rest of the world is going to go there to add five new capacity launch 6G systems do a lot of mobile activity. The other advantage of this stat is that it lets the US match the planned mobile deployments in the nearby 6 gigahertz band which isn't available to us. So even though we can't get in 6, it means we can get into same [inaudible] range, because these bands are right next to each other. And what does that mean? That needs we benefit from economies of scale, it means we participate in the same equipment market, it means we realize all the benefits as if we were in 6 ourselves. So this is now a really uniquely important opportunity for the United States. So there's there's not a lot of opportunity, but there's a lot of progress I can be made if we can take advantage of the bands that are available to us. And I [inaudible]. Thank you.

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