As mentioned, I'm Becky Tangren. I'm Vice President and Associate General Counsel for NCTA, the Internet and Television Association. NCTA represents our country's foremost catering providers, and they provide high speed broadband over their networks. And we also represent the creators of the exciting content that you get over those networks. So I really appreciate you all taking the time this morning. And I realized I might be standing between you and lunch. So I hope you get something out of this. But I hope you walk away with understanding there are different ways to access spectrum, not just the traditional way, which some of you may be, or may not be familiar with. But our country has traditionally option spectrum. And those windows get exclusive use licenses. But there's actually men and other ways to access spectrum, including shared use, and unlicensed. And and we'll delve into that a little bit and talk about some of the near term opportunities to harness these spectrum access models. So I already explained to NCTA is by you may be wondering, wide table a wire is interested in wireless technologies. Well, cable operators actually rely very heavily on spectrum, the foremost way is through Wi Fi, which is an unlicensed technology. And I'm assuming you're all familiar with Wi Fi and use it on a daily basis when in your homes or Atlas conference, or even in your car or on an aeroplane or on a train. cable operators also use something called fixed wireless, which extends extends the reach of a broadband network in areas where it may not be feasible to bring the cable directly to the home or to the business. This is particularly helpful in rural areas or places with challenging topographies. And finally, recently, cable providers are actually providing competitive mobile broadband services and orphans at much lower prices than the consumer can get from your traditional wireless carrier. And cable operators combined make the nation's fourth largest competitive nationwide provider or mobile broadband services. And we rely primarily on unlicensed and shared license frameworks to bring consumers and businesses these services. So why are we talking about spectrum access models, especially out out of state of the net conference? Well, these days, getting them on wine wirelessly is pretty synonymous with getting online, because I look around and I see a lot of you are on your phones while you're accessing the Internet adding up you're doing and without a wire. And this is a pivotal pivotal time to make decisions about how to access spectrum, not just because our airwaves are congested. That's not really a new problem. But more and more users want to access that spectrum. And we have nice solutions for making that happen. I'm sure you've heard from Secretary Davidson that at the end of last year, and tf NTIA released its national spectrum strategy, which sets forth a pat path forward for making more commercial spectrum available in the short term. And in the long term. And it explicitly mentions Spectrum sharing and unlicensed as a way to make this happen. As always, America wants to maintain its status as a global leader. And we do this by strengthening our economy. And we can strengthen our economy by allowing all sectors in the economy, all businesses, whether large or small and consumers to get online. And this is directly impacted by the spectrum access mechanism that we choose. If we choose access mechanisms that have lower barriers to entry, we by default, get more people online. And it's not just about businesses. It's also about achieving public policy goals and allowing multiple sectors of our society to get online. This is in contrast to the exclusive use licensing model that is being advocated on the global stage by America's number one competitor of the People's Republic of China. Now they have a very vested interest in enabling exclusive use licensing across the world. That's because Chinese companies are the number one manufacturer of the technologies that go into those networks. So if we are pushing forward as such a licensing model, we're there for helping the Chinese why wouldn't we want to do what America has always done best and innovate and to foster American technologies? That's not to say that the exclusive use licensee haven't played a role in our spectrum policy at the advent of wireless technology. Our goal was let's get as many people in onto the wireless network as possible and cover as many miles as possible. And the best way to do that was through auctioning off these very large geographic license areas. But we now need a spectrum very differently. I mentioned that a lot of the ways consumers use it. But businesses and governments and farmers all want to use spectrum in very targeted ways, whether that's to automate manufacturing, or monitor their cross. And even if they had the billions of dollars that it costs these days to buy a large area exclusive use license, it wouldn't make any sense. Why would you want to buy a license, that's the site in the state of Pennsylvania when you just need to cover your educational campus or your manufacturing campus? So let's look ahead to the future. I think I've already mentioned a lot of a lot of these benefits that are offered by coexistence models. And I think we'll see that as we dive deeper into both shared licensing and on license. So what is shared license? Well, there are a number of technologies and a number of flavors of shared license and can share a spectrum and time geography frequency. But the cornerstone of this framework is the ability not just to get multiple users onto the spectrum, but to enable multiple use cases and multiple services. The citizens broadband Radio Service is the leading example of a shared license framework. This is for those of you familiar with the specter chart. This is the 3.5 gigahertz band, also coveted mid band spectrum. And the FCC and NTIA did something very unique. Here, they created a multi tier Chairman regime, which allowed commercial users to access spectrum that was primarily used by the US Navy, and commercial users can access the spectrum either through a lower level tier and that essentially, if you buy the equipment that works, you can get online, you also have the opportunity to buy a license at auction, which enables greater interference protection rights. But even this auction was done differently than traditional FCC auctions. It was based on smaller geographic license areas, and using lower power levels. And the results were staggering. There were 10 clients more winning bidders than at more traditional spectrum options, including the option of the 3.4, or five gigahertz band, which is immediately below this CDRs fan, which is how they hear later. And all of this without displacing if at all and companies. In fact, both users are sharing the sand without one case of harmful interference to federal incumbents. So what opportunities lie ahead to expand the CRS framework? Well, if you go a little farther to the south, there's a 3.1 gigahertz band. And it's the tip of everyone's tongue this day sounds these days because it was identified by an infrastructure Act, which we just heard a little bit about, to be studied to enable commercial use, because again, it's used by our US military. And a group of experts from both the Department of Defense and potential incoming commercial users have spent the past two years analyzing the space. And so we have the opportunity to continue this work and finalize the sharing framework that was identified by this essentially Trelleborg blazing multistakeholder group because Never before had we had government and potential commercial engines have conversations. in such detail, this band was identified by the National spectrum strategy for further study. So we should build upon the existing work and not be distracted by opponents of sharing who would like to start over for their own competitive reasons. And then hopefully, after the NTA study is done, the FCC can move forward with rules similar to CVRs, based on low power levels, and smaller license sizes, and I think we'll see even greater benefits than what we see in CRS, because the incumbencies are more complex there. So there was stuff added benefit of not slowing down from virtualization is it would cost so much time and money to to think ly clear those incumbents. And also, as I already mentioned, people want to use spectrum differently now. So we should create more opportunity needed. So phospho those use cases. Okay, moving on to unlicensed. While it's right there in the name. It has a very low barrier way to access spectrum. You don't even need a license, as long as you are using the equipment that is compatible with the technical parameters set forth by the FCC. Anyone else can use on a license by Wi Fi is the most common use of this spectrum. And it contributes greatly to American society. And
because I mentioned and I'm sure you all all use Wi Fi every day as you hospitals as to businesses as to educational institutions. It benefits the American economy greatly. It's all paced to add $1.58 trillion to the US economy on an annual basis. And it connects the average of 25 wireless devices that you not a average American household uses on a daily basis, and majority of those devices run on Wi Fi. And I'd be willing to bet none of you are sitting at home tethered to your access point, my Tron line you want to walk around you want to connect to your treadmill. So we can't let unlicensed spectrum become the backlog to accessing all those exciting devices. And, sure a lot of you don't realize this, but 80% of the data that goes over your mobile phone actually traverses the Wi Fi network, not those big cell towers that you see off the highways, and Wi Fi has the benefit of being an American in technology. So what opportunities do we have to meet growing Wi-Fi demand, while the latest Wi Fi standards run on larger channel sizes. So again, another reason why we need more unlicensed spectrum. And a wired broadband networks are just offering faster and better services. So we do not want spectrum to become the backlog. And you can't have those new services like ARB li because we don't have enough spectrum. And there's another VM that was identified by the National spectrum strategy, the seven eight gigahertz band, which is a critical, critical opportunity for Wi-Fi. And this is a very old spectrum man. And we should study it thoroughly. But the law and 125 megahertz of this band is primed for unlicensed use. That's because the chips are already in your wireless devices. It's just not legal in the US to turn them on. But as soon as the US says that it's okay. And we won't cause interference to them comments, which again, are federal users, then we could immediately allow consumers to access the spectrum. And although there are federal incumbents in this band, Wi-Fi already protects very similar and incumbents in the band that's immediately below the seven eight gigahertz band. And we've done this without any Hansal and Oceania. And so if you feel pretty confident that we could protect very similar technologies, just because they're used by the federal government doesn't change the underlying technology. So we urge NTIA to prioritize studying this ban and let consumers get their hands on it. And let's all start using more Wi-Fi. So I know that was a lot of information and then about 10 minutes, I told you at least out a little insight into different spectrum access technologies. And I'm happy to answer your question is like a high definition so it was to me so reach out on any type Asia
