 Good afternoon and welcome to the New America Foundation and to our policy forum this afternoon on spectrum sharing and the implementation of the PCAST spectrum report recommendations. I'm Alan Davidson, the new director of the Open Technology Institute here at the New America Foundation and I'm particularly delighted to be welcoming this panel and this session on a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of many of us at New America. It is a very exciting time for wireless and spectrum policy. User demand is exploding for mobile broadband data. We've got growth of over 60% per year. We know that this area of policy is becoming more and more important to everyday Americans and the New America Wireless Future Project has been at the forefront of advocating for more unlicensed and spectrum band sharing for over a decade. So we're very glad to be sponsoring this event today. I will say I guess to many Americans the words 200 page government report are probably more synonymous with other words like paperweight or doorstop or kindling. We're not used to getting a lot out of our government reports. But every now and then a report comes along that captures a brilliant new concept or excites the imagination, spurs actual government action and the PCAS 2012 spectrum report was just such a report. It crystallized, it put weight behind an elegant and powerful idea that spectrum sharing, new spectrum sharing technologies could radically improve our utilization of our spare spectrum resources. And in the process spur real growth and real technology leadership in our industry. It holds out today the promise of creating an achievable approach to dealing with the demand for wireless communications that we face. And the report itself provided a set of detailed and practical recommendations to actually realize this potential. So this report is a rare case of a federal committee proposing a breakthrough to a critical policy challenge and having an immediate impact. Nearly two years later after the release of the report in 2012, we're delighted to welcome a distinguished set of speakers to discuss how the administration and the FCC are implementing these recommendations and to talk about the importance of this to our nation's economy. We're especially pleased to have several members of the original PCAS committee. Like Wendy is here, Mark Gorenberg, we're going to be joined by Milo Medin, who was a invited expert. We've got Tom Powers from the White House, John Liebowitz from the FCC, and Jason Furman will be joining us shortly who is chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers. So in other words, we have a star studded lineup for you here today. Just a few quick programming notes. This is going to be live streamed. This is being live streamed on the New America website and we'll have it archived there if you'd like to see it later. We invite you to tweet about it. I think we're using the hashtags pound PCAST and pound spectrum, so have at it. To moderate this intrepid group, we have Michael Calbris, who is the director of the Wireless Futures Project here at New America. He was also one of the invited experts who helped draft the PCAST report and he has been a tireless advocate, as many of you know, in this space for quite a while. So please join me in welcoming Michael and our distinguished panel. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Alan. And it's great to have Alan on board now as the director of our Open Technology Institute and of tech policy here at New American General. It's rare to have someone with so much experience both in the public interest in the corporate world back at, you know, here at New America. So I won't repeat, you know, I would just like to second everything that Alan said about what an unusual impactful report the PCAST put forward back in July 2012 initially and it was in a tremendous amount of work and we have actually, you know, a few of the people who did that work here today, which is terrific. It was a real breakthrough and I think also a tribute to the PCAST leadership team that they involved the White House, the rest of the White House led by Tom Power. The FCC, where John Leibovitz was the liaison and NTIA as well in that process, which I think made it much easier for it to actually come out in a practical way and as you'll hear in this event move toward implementation. So I'd like to introduce first Tom Power, who is the deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications in the White House office on science and technology policy. He came to the White House from the Department of Commerce, where he served as chief of staff to Larry Strickling, the assistant secretary and administrator of NTIA, NTIA of course coordinates federal spectrum use and assignments and use and so Tom, you know, had that great background coming in. He was also an advisor to PCAST during the entire process. So Tom, you're up. Thank you, Michael and Alan, and congratulations to both Alan and New America for your new relationship. That's terrific. And especially Michael and the New America team that have been so forward thinking on spectrum issues. It's been really important to our administration. We have, as everyone in this room knows, been pretty active on that front with the presidential memorandum back in 2010 setting a course to free up 500 megahertz of spectrum for wireless broadband. The American Jobs Act, the spectrum provisions there, which morphed into the middle class tax relief and job creation act of 2012, the 2013 presidential memorandum encouraging greater sharing and efficiency on the federal side, and of course all the work of the FCC and the PCAST report. I'm still a little bit in shock over the announcement by David Letterman yesterday that he's going to be retiring, almost didn't make it today, and I was scouring around trying to come up with stupid wireless tricks or a top 10 list of new wireless ideas, and someone just proposed one to me, which was we put the wires back on the mics. But that might solve some things. So we have plenty of work streams that have been initiated under the memoranda, under the legislation, under the FCC rule makings, a lot to talk about. I wanted to focus on a couple things specifically that have been spawned by the PCAST report. And, you know, just to put it in context, at the highest level, the PCAST report just reflected sort of a basic observation about what happens when you have increasing demand for a finite resource. The traditional approach had been that we find bands that are appealing to the commercial sector. You pick up the federal systems, move them up the band somewhere, drop them down, and then you freed up the old federal band for commercial use. Obviously it doesn't create more spectrum, it just sort of moves the pieces around the chessboard. And it takes a lot of time and it costs money, and both those are imposed on carriers and other wireless providers and ultimately on the customers and users. So, you know, the PCAST was simply asking the question, isn't there a better way, a smarter way, a more efficient use of federally assigned spectrum so that commercial interests and users can exploit available spectrum more quickly and more cheaply? There are a lot of things we can point to out of the PCAST report that have taken root since the issuance of the report, a lot of the recommendations that have really taken, become concrete. The first one I would point to, obviously, is the spectrum access system that the PCAST recommended. John Liebowitz is here and I'm sure he's going to tell us some more about that, so I won't get into it in too much detail, but obviously this was a way of starting with, let's say, a federally assigned band where you've got federal users finding opportunities in there for shared use, creating a three-tiered system so you have the feds sort of as the incumbents, some kind of licensed scheme at the second level and then unlicensed at the third level. I will let John get into the details. Very excited that Chairman Wheeler this week circulated an item to his fellow commissioners for a possible action at the April meeting, but just the idea that it was July of 2012 that the PCAST issued their report, it was December of 2012 that the FCC put it into a notice of proposed rulemaking and now we're on the verge of seeing it as a report and order, which is just fantastic work to John and his team. I think that's one example, and I apologize for a second, it's one example of a really change in attitude we've seen in DC, how the PCAST has helped change the dialogue and brought much greater collaboration between the government sector and the private sector and even among federal interests. A lot of these spectrum decisions historically get decided in silos within the agencies. You're seeing much greater collaboration on all fronts and a lot of great effort within the agencies in tough budget times. It's always risky to start singling people out, but certainly Teri Takai, the CIO at the Defense Department and her team have been doing terrific work and the guy who actually still signs my paycheck, Larry Strickling, and I would say it anyway, but who's coordinating things with the NTIA and the work of the federal agencies is reflected in a lot of what the FCC is now able to do, whether you talk about the 3.5 gigahertz ruling, the other big report in order this week in the 1755 ban being freed up by the feds, there's an ongoing proceeding looking at 195 megahertz in the 5 gigahertz ban that the feds freed up. We had the H block auction earlier this year, the other 5 gigahertz order from this week and of course the broadcast incentive auction, so much going on. Another idea I think spawned by the PCAST that was considered in the 1755 rulemaking is this concept of reciprocal sharing. We talk about finding opportunities in federal assignments where the spectrum is not being used and leveraging that for commercial opportunities. There's the flip side of that too. We have situations where when a carrier is licensed, they of course build out based on demand and that means not necessarily building out to the full geographic scope of their license from the get go, so there's opportunities there and you might find opportunities, particularly in rural areas where you have some kind of government operation, a base or a test range where the sharing can work in reverse. The commission raised that for the 2155 ban as part of the AWS 3 rulemaking. I think, as you probably know, the NTIA weighed in on behalf of the Defense Department and the other agencies and said we're not quite ready to nail that down to come up with specific rules yet. I think it's a live option, but the NTIA did ask that the commission defer on that for now, but it's another innovative idea that I think we can give credit to the PCAST for. Another effort that is underway at NTIA is taking a close look and making a real quantitative assessment of how the agencies use the spectrum assigned to them, and again this goes back to the underlying theme of the PCAST report that rather than picking up federal systems and moving them, let's look for opportunities where they lie. Of course, there's anecdotal evidence we've heard of agencies that have spectrum assignments, the system is retired and they keep the assignment. Different opportunities like that, the agencies for their part say you might not find as much as you think you're going to find, but that's the question and rather than pursuing it in this siloed way, let's look at this in a coordinated way. In the presidential memorandum, we directed NTIA to create a framework by which agencies would do a real quantitative assessment of how they're using the spectrum. You can look at their calls for spectrum inventories where you could say, well, we'll look at 1755 to 1780 and here are a bunch of assignments to DOD and here are some to DHS and here are some to DOJ, but it doesn't tell you much about the actual usage and so that's what we were trying to get at here because to free it up, we have to find it and identify it first. What NTIA is doing is they're going to start with bands that they've already identified as being probably the more amenable to commercial use and require the agencies to report on what that actual usage looks like from a temporal and geographic component and then that will kick start a process to look even more closely at those bands to see what kind of commercial exploitation might be able to be made of them and then eventually we're going to take that same process and blend it into all the spectrum assignments that are out there. When NTIA issues an assignment to a federal agency, they have to come in and basically re-op it or renew it every five years or 10 years depending on the nature of the system and as part of that process now, NTIA will require them to add a little bit more information on how they're actually using the band. In our presidential memorandum of last year, we also directed NTIA to set up a pilot program to do actual monitoring in the field to measure spectrum usage. There have been efforts and in fact I think America sponsored one a while back and there are other efforts going on all over the place but this would complement the idea of having agencies report individually. This would complement that by having a real world pilot program in some geographic area actually listening in. NTIA has put a proposal out for public comment, has gotten public comment in. We've actually part of the president's FY15 budget for NTIA would include funding for this program. We've got to get that budget through Congress of course and it's trickier than it might sound in some cases what a federal system doing is actually just listening. Listening for potential threats from across the ocean or from outer space and so just because you don't hear anything doesn't mean there isn't some activity going on there. So that's one of the challenges there but NTIA is working hard both on the reporting requirement and eventually to get the pilot program set up. Another recommendation from the PCAS report finds its concrete result in the spectrum policy team, the White House spectrum policy team that's co-chaired now by my boss the CTO Todd Park and Jeff Zeinz, the new chair of the National Economic Council. The point I guess of the spectrum policy team is really to bring more resources to bear and more coordination on attacking all these issues and supporting NTIA and the other agencies in their work. The other members of the White House spectrum policy team in addition to OSTP and NEC are the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Security staff. The spectrum policy team in turn is looking at some of the other substantive recommendations of the PCAS and there are several. One of the more interesting ones is this issue of agency incentives. I'm sure all of you know the current approach essentially has the agencies estimate their relocation costs in anticipation of an auction and then the FCC sets a reserve price that has to be at least 110% of the estimated costs and we have a successful auction if that number is hit or exceeded and then the funds can be used to compensate the agencies. For the agencies it's kind of a status quo. They sort of get back to where they started so it's not exactly a strong incentive. The 2012 Act helped a little bit on this. It specifically said that agencies in preparing to relocate could invest in state of the art equipment. They don't have to replace 20-year-old hardware with 20-year-old hardware but there were still some limitations on that. Whether it was required to maintain comparable capabilities and only if any increases in functionality were incremental or incidental. The PCAS came up with a new approach on this and something called spectrum currency. So the idea is essentially that you create a separate currency. So as agencies relink with spectrum they get credits for that currency and then over time those credits build up and then they can use that and turn it into real dollars to do real acquisitions. One of the keys to this is to sort of separate it from the standard budget practice and process because otherwise you run the risk of an agency getting credit only to have it taken away when they go back into the budget cycle. So it's looking longer term and keeping it separate from the budget process. That approach has spawned a lot of thinking and including up on the hill where there are a couple bills now pending looking at different ways of providing incentives to agencies. Congresswoman Matsui and Congressman Guthrie introduced a bill back in December that would essentially take the broadcast incentive auction idea and apply it to agencies. So the agencies would be entitled to a share, a percentage of the auction revenues and one of the interesting aspects of it is the money wouldn't necessarily go to relocation costs or spectrum costs. In fact, the money could go to anything that was the subject of a sequester cut. So much more flexibility for the agencies and yet still limited to items that have been authorized and approved and funded by Congress and OMB previously. There is a more recent bill, Senator Kirk introduced a much broader look at a number of aspects of spectrum policy which I won't get into the details of other than to mention that in this case the Secretary of Defense when DOD gets funding back it says they could invest in state of the art equipment regardless if necessary to maintain comparable capability if the defense secretary felt that was appropriate. So again just a little more flexibility for the agency to exercise in taking these funds and I'm not here to comment on any of the bills specifically I just find it interesting that we are seeing so much activity and thought being brought to bear on this issue of incentives especially since the release of the PCAST report. The spectrum policy team itself is looking at this we put out a request for information back in February seeking public comment. We had also accompanied that with a report that we had commissioned to sort of summarize various approaches, various proposals to incentives. We will be making our own recommendations later this year based on the input we've got. Other PCAST recommendations are being implemented as well particularly I might just highlight a couple more due diligence by agencies under OMB guidance in designing and procuring systems so as to be more efficient, being more flexible up front you know to give you one example there are systems, expensive systems whether they are jets or satellites or any number of other systems that are tuned, the radios are tuned to work on one band and so when we get to a point of trying to be more flexible it's a huge expense. You can imagine a satellite, you can't do a truck roll to the satellite, well you can but somebody has to be there between 10 and 2 on Thursday to let the guy in so there's not a lot of spectrum humor, it just isn't. Anyway we want to give more flexibility, have the agencies think about flexibility when they are doing their procurements, of course you run into a challenge here which is if an agency says I want to invest in and procure a new system it's going to be $100 million but for $125 million I can get added spectrum flexibility. The folks at OMB and on the hill the appropriators have to think about that because that's $25 million that could be going to deficit reduction or something else but OMB is coming up ask them out with new guidance on this to make sure that the agencies are verifying that they have at least thought through this process it's hard to know, every procurement will raise its own issues but at least we want to make sure that they are verifying that they are thinking about these issues and then finally just greater collaboration between the federal and the commercial stakeholders, NIST and NTIA have announced plans to stand up a center for advanced communications at the Boulder Labs which can be a real hub for both private and public R&D in some of these areas and finally I guess probably the last time I'll mention is the PCAST recommended the establishment of a test city, a real-world environment where you could carriers and other industry players could try out new models, new business models, new applications, new services. We've been between NTIA, OSTP, the FCC, we've been looking at that. It seems like a lot of the tools are in place through experimental licensing for example industry could today go and try to set this up maybe do an MOU with the right city who's willing to collaborate to be very flexible when it comes to allowing installations on rooftops and bridges and so forth but what we want to do is try to convene and kick start that and make sure we got all the right stakeholders thinking collaboratively about that so we're still kicking that around but you'll probably hear more about that soon. I will just close by saying the PCAST has had an effect internationally. A month or so ago I sat down with a professor from a French engineering school she had previously served as the equivalent of an FCC commissioner and she's been appointed by a French cabinet minister to write a report on Spectrum and Spectrum Sharing and she wanted to talk all about the PCAST report and the administration's policy and we got to the end of a long conversation and she said I just want to ask you one more question which is why is your president the only leader who talks about Spectrum? Everywhere else in the world including in Europe it's just a dry topic and she said I'm writing this report this is sort of the biggest deal going on in Europe and nobody would know about this but your president talks about Spectrum and I said well it's about the economy and she laughed and she said well we have an economy and I said well you should be talking more about Spectrum. So it has been as Alan said the impact of this report really has been unbelievable to watch and it's been a great honor and pleasure and just fun to be in the middle of it. OSDP kind of hosts the PCAST administratively. We don't get to edit what they say. They can bounce ideas off of us but it's their report. We don't have to follow what they say but if they have good ideas we do and this has just been an amazing collaboration and an amazing result between what you've seen at NTIA, the agencies and the FCC and it's really great to have Craig Mundy and Mark Gorenberg here who were really instrumental in putting this thing together. So with that I will turn it over to Jason Furman who I think I saw coming. Yes thank you. Jason as you know as the chairman of the council of economic advisors he has been hugely instrumental in shaping spectrum policy and a whole lot of other things. I don't know quite how he does that but it's been a great honor and pleasure for me to be able to work with him and he's been a great resource for me. So let me turn it over to the chairman of the council of economic advisors Jason Furman. Thanks Tom and thanks Michael for organizing this and why don't I start where you where you ended Tom and just say that the PCAST report has been enormously important in our work and it's been enormously important I think for two reasons. Number one is the quality of ideas in the report thanks to Mark and Craig and and many others in the work they did but just as important there's an awful lot of great reports that get written including maybe even some great reports by by PCAST and this one has really had a lot of champions in the administration and no one more active energetic and thoughtful and champion than Tom Power and you know I've learned so much from him in that context it has the enthusiasm of a broad range of people Larry Strickling many others who helped push it forward as well and Tom wasn't kidding you about the president and the president's interest in spectrum I go to a lot of meetings on a wide range of topics with the president and I don't think there any meetings that are more exciting and energizing for him than PCAST meetings and PCAST meetings usually I'm serious and PCAST meetings usually have a lot of topics on the agenda and I think in the last one for example it was a jump ball as to what was more exciting for him the discussion of untreatable infectious diseases or spectrum and one of those was a really scary thing for our country and the other was a really exciting opportunity for our country and the president charged us directly with pushing forward you know in particular on the test cities concept which was one of the things in the report that was not in that initial presidential memorandum and and we've been doing that you know what I wanted to use you know more of my time and how much time should I be using Michael I'm not sure what your schedule is and you can feel free to take questions at the end right what I want to use more time I'm love a little time for question was to put a little bit of picture context on this and if you haven't read it yet we have you know an entire discussion entire chapter of our latest economic report of the president which came out about a month ago that is devoted to the topic of technology and the economy and the reason we devoted entire chapter to it is because technology shows up really importantly in growth and it shows up really importantly in inequality and so I wanted to give a little bit of a big picture about where all of this fits and then drill back down one thing since writing that chapter Tomas Piketty who is probably the leading researcher on inequality in the world has written an enormous tome capital in the 21st century and it has some ideas about the role of growth and inequality that I think are really novel and interesting that he himself doesn't fully draw out so that was something I wished I had thought of when we had written this and can put growth in the context of inequality that way as well you know stepping back and you know this is something I've gone over a lot if you look at labor productivity output per hour for workers it grew at a 2.7 percent rate in the decades after World War two a lot of that was pent up inventions during the course of the war that were deployed to civilian use afterwards some of that were public investments not very high-tech ones like the interstate highway system and a lot of that came grinding to a halt around the early 70s in part due to the disruptions related to the oil shocks and productivity growth which had been 2.7 percent a year slowed to 1.4 percent a year and stated about that rate for another 20 years and you know at the time this was puzzling to people because people are excited about technology now but people were also really excited about computers and technology in the 1980s and it seemed amazing you know you could put a computer on your desk for example and even with all that happening you weren't seeing it in the productivity statistics that all changed back again starting around the mid 1990s and what we called then the new economy that in part was premised on information technology helped bring the productivity growth back up to 2.3 percent so not as much as it had been in the decades after World War II but significantly above what it was in those sort of slower not quite lost but slower decades after after the oil shocks if you drill down and ask yourself what the source of this productivity growth is it is you know about half of it is due to what economists call total factor productivity growth or multi-factor productivity growth so that's not extra capital which helps with productivity it's not improved quality of labor which helps with productivity but it's how much you can get out of a given quantity of capital labor and that's what grew so quickly after World War II that's what grew so slowly after the oil shock and that's what picked up again and the policies in this area when it comes to spectrum the P cast in this particular area is very much focused on total factor productivity growth and multi-factor productivity growth you know the same time that you care about growth we care very much about whether that growth is translating into higher incomes for you know working Americans for the middle class and that process isn't automatic in fact some of the innovation and technologies we've had have done more to compliment high skilled workers than lower skilled workers and so that's increased the demand for high skilled workers boosted their productivity and raised their wages and at the same time it's put those pressures in an opposite direction on lower wage workers and has thus helped increase inequality the solution to that and this is long been understood isn't slowing the growth rate of technology but is first of all better equipping people to use that technology so you have more of a supply of skilled workers which means more people have the opportunity to go up and the inequality is caused by the disconnect of the expanded demand without the increased supply to meet it is what raises inequality so expanding the supply of skilled workers and everything from preschool through high school redesign through access to college and improved training are an important part of our agenda in that regard but part of it is also taking technology and using it as a force to directly expand opportunity and reduce inequality and perhaps the most important example of that right now is the connected initiative that the president has been pushing forward and that the FCC is playing a critical part in and that's all about taking technology and taking advantage of improved wired and wireless broadband the lowered price increasingly low price of devices and using that to make sure that everyone has the type of educational opportunities they had everything I've said so far is the relatively standard although not as appreciated as it should be story behind productivity growth and inequality over the last several decades and it's the story that we embodied in the economic report the newer twist that certainly I'm trying to get my own head around is what I referred to in these important ideas that were put forward by Tomas Piketty in this very important book and his fundamental insight is that inequality is caused by two things one is labor income being less equally distributed which is what I was just talking about but the second is a shift in the share of income and in the last about 20 years we've seen a fall in the share of income that goes to labor and arise in the share of income that goes to capital the reason that matters is that capital is distributed even less equally than labor so if more income shifts from labor to capital that is going to increase the amount of inequality question is what does that have to do with the PCAST report the answer is that an important determinant of the amount of income that goes to labor versus capital is the growth rate in the economy and there's a simplistic way to think about that which is that your wealth on average grows with the rate of return in the economy which economists would use the letter R for and your labor income in general will grow with the growth rate of the economy as the economy grows your wages you know roughly grow anything that means the growth rate is slowing means those wages are going to grow more slowly if interest rates stay about the same and over very long periods of time they roughly do or rates of return to capital roughly do that's going to mean wealth capital accumulation and you know what you can live off of essentially investing in markets is going to grow much more quickly than wages overall income is going to shift towards capital and that's a deep structural force driving an increase in inequality you know conversely what that means is if you can get your growth rate up and raise it through these types of innovations then you can have in your total national income wages growing more quickly you can start to slow down or reverse the shift in the share of income going to capital and push it back towards labor and all else being equal that means you would have reduced inequality and what that means is rather than just the traditional story of growth helps lift everyone up so even if you have just as much inequality more growth means at least the bottom in the middle are doing better more growth might do that but it also might be a force for reducing the gap between the top and the bottom especially when it comes to the shares of their income that come from capital and come from labor and so I think all of that underscores why the most central thing in economic policy over the medium and long run is our productivity growth rate the most essential thing in that is technology and in that area one of the most important and exciting developments is what wireless broadband has the capability for doing in terms of freeing us up in terms of mobile devices the role they play in education you know in the context of connected in energy in health care in you know in leisure time in production processes and in the economy more broadly when you know I think of the role of government policy in this area you know I organize it into four categories the first is the government plays an important role investing in R&D and we all know the origins of the Internet and DARPA you know when it comes to specifically to the issue of spectrum sharing you know DOD is you know thanks in large part to the PCAST report and thanks in large part to people like Tom and the spectrum management team that have really been helping to work with them and push them along have been focused on research in this area and we also have a hundred million dollars through NSF DARPA commerce and others that's going towards this type of research the second area of public policy is catalyzing private investment and there's a lot the government can do but there's a lot the private sector can and should do and you know that's anything from from tax policies like the R&D tax credit or increasing the incentive to innovate rather than litigate which the president's proposals on patent reform something very similar to which passed the house and is working its way through the Senate are designed to do the third area of public policy is catalyzing that infrastructure and when it comes to roads there's not a lot of catalyzing of the infrastructure a lot of that's federally financed here the vast bulk of the infrastructure is privately financed and I've described our approach to this you know taking a page from our approach to you know another policy area as in all of the above approach that that exclusive use license spectrum plays an important role that unlicensed spectrum plays an important role that shared spectrum plays an important role and we basically would like to have more of all of these and you know moreover they don't I mean they can compete with each other and competing with each other can actually be healthy and good and something that we want to encourage in the economy but they can also complement each other in terms of for example Wi-Fi offloading a lot of the traffic that otherwise would have been on an exclusive licensed use or shared spectrum and non-shared spectrum when it comes to shared spectrum that model of the government having the three-tiered model of the government having first access something licensed coming below it and something unlicensed coming below that I think is one of many you know intriguing models that have been put put forward and we're gonna need to invest more in technology to make this work we're also gonna need to invest more in economic theories design of auctions design of property rights and a set of incentives so that people know you know what they do and and don't have in that regard as well and some of that work is underway but much more of it remains to be done you know finally you know the fourth area of public policy ties back to that framework I was starting in the beginning which is we have to ensure that the benefits of these innovations you know are shared and that's something that partly happens automatically you know the benefits of something like Wikipedia or Google are you know very broadly accessible to people all across the United States and all across the world and have been enormously democratizing in reducing the gap in knowledge between you know the most fortunate and the least fortunate but you know other technologies and innovations can go the opposite way and can threaten to increase those gaps and so being mindful of that and as I said the ConnectEd initiative is the best example but it's not the only example what was done through BTOP what's been done by the FCC through a BTOP in our our US what's been done by the FCC through universal service reform in other areas are about spreading the benefits of broadband and those are efforts that going forward can rely not just on the ways they've been done in the past but should be thinking about you know the innovations and ideas the PCAST has had in spectrum sharing and what role they can play in that as well so you know Tom went through a lot of the nitty-gritty a lot better than I could have but you know this is very much a team effort and it's a team effort that is you know led not on a day-to-day basis by the president of the United States and he puts a lot of motivation behind all of us in doing it and you know we're gonna keep pushing forward on the economics of it on the technology of it on just even I think a lot of progress people have dealt with the government would tell you just even on the internal management of the government and how our spectrum users think about the spectrum they use and you know what can be done you know what can be done with it more effectively and you know we're gonna do all that because this is one of the most important one of the important determinants of growth and of the degree to which ordinary families benefit from that growth so I'm happy to take a few questions if they get too hard I have at least one lifeline in the room but can open it up you asked why President Obama is involved in spectrum I was a consultant one points Vivian Redding when she was a European's arena of the European Union's arena for a spectrum can you be a little louder yeah I Mike Marcus I was one point was a consultant of Vivian Redding when she was European Commissioner for Information and Science she now has it has different portfolio in the European Union she was very interested in spectrum but the problem basically was that the US had has more serious structural spectrum problems than Europe does and particularly the 1978 creation of NTIA sort of isolated spectrum management from national goals unfortunately so I think you're moving back in the right direction but I think the prop the reason why the president's got involved is that frankly had to get involved and I think he's doing a good job moving in the right direction but we had a we have a unique problem in the United States with a bifurcation of two separate agencies and the pen the pendulum is moving back the other way thanks to the effort you describe but that's probably the reason why the president has spectrum on his tongue as European counterparts don't because they didn't have the same problems we got I think that's an interesting point so thanks for it yeah Gerald Chandler how much effect do you think NAFTA particularly integration between Mexico and the US has had on increased inequality in the US this Tom do you want to take that one you know I think I have not studied NAFTA in particular there are two things one would care about in trading globalization inequality one is the broader trend towards greater integration with the rest of the world you know globalization what that does for inequality and then second is what a particular agreement like TPP with our Pacific partners or t-tip with our European partners would do to inequality and those two questions can have different answers I think on the first question globalization expanded trade have played a role in increased inequality and they've played a role for the conventional trade theory supply and demand reasons that are the analog of the technological supply and demand I was talking about before and you know our comparative advantage in the United States is skilled workers and as trade expands it increases the reward to the skilled workers and it puts some unskilled workers into greater competition and that creates challenge for inequality creates a sorry he has he actually pays less attention to globalization actually doesn't think it's a factory sites it as an important one but I think has less original analysis to contribute you know in that area but so I think globalization played a role I think it's also played a role in increased living standards and the cheaper things we can buy and the higher-paid jobs and overall growth rates so there's a lot of things on the other side of ledger think a lot of that trend though wasn't even a wasn't a function of any particular agreement it was just a function of the whole set of things that have increased trade links between countries when you look at particular agreements like TPP for example we're seeking enforceable labor standards which would bring up the labor standards in countries like Vietnam that and those are countries we would have traded with regardless of the agreement by raising their labor standards that can help potentially reduce inequality and make that labor agreement in quality reducing but I think we probably want to stick more to the topic at hand I'm inferring here Jason by the way thank you tremendously for your leadership you were with us all the way through including when we rolled it out in the White House in July of 2012 a very forceful speech on it you you've also by the way look great you've lost I think about 60 pounds since the report came out so I think since everybody's giving us credit so much credit here today can we take we'll take some credit for making you happy and being part of that process too but I wanted to ask you about your comment about short and medium term licenses economic theory you know some of the things you're starting to look at to look at the potential growth streams revenue streams innovation streams that come out of that and I was wondering if you wanted to talk any more about that now or should we just consider that a work in progress I think it's a work in progress my colleague Dave Ballin from the Council of Economic Advisers who's our senior economist on this issue has been spending a lot of time on it but I don't I don't feel 100% ready for prime time but we've certainly been thinking about how you do how you all we know how to auction off effectively unlimited rights that's what we do right now how do you auction off limited rights how do people know exactly what they're buying how do you you know take advantage of more modern efficient technologies to do you know auctions in different ways and a lot of this isn't in the purview of the FCC and others are the ones whose job it is to figure that out but you know both inside government outside government we need to be putting our best thought into it you know you just look at the way you know ad space and eyeballs are auctioned off on the internet by the second and by the eyeball and wonder you know we're not sort of ready to do that in the next year but is that where we're going to be 10 years from now what would it 20 years from now what would it take to get there you know I think you want to be you know sort of both practical but some especially those of us that aren't designing the next set of auction rolls and CA has nothing to do with the next set of auction rolls you have a little bit of a luxury of being a little more blue sky and thinking a little bit further ahead about where you might want to drive things in the future you can you can take your microphone back move on though but I want to thank you very much for coming over on what must be a busy day with the job numbers out and and so on and and thanks for making this an economic issue which it absolutely is okay thank you all right thank you yeah and then no too it's interesting on the on the economic front that there was a just curtain you mentioned it just a few weeks ago a study came out which is probably I think the best one to date by Raul Katz a professor at Columbia Business School which estimated for unlicensed spectrum which is one species of shared spectrum that it contributes estimating that it contributes about 220 billion dollars a year to the American economy in terms of activity generated and its value so it came out from Wi-Fi forward so that's worth looking at as well next we have John Leibovitz who is the deputy bureau chief of the FCC's wireless telecommunications bureau also spectrum advisor to the chairman an additional title he acquired when chairman Wheeler came into office and John you know he knows all about this because he served as the FCC's liaison to p-cast and as Tom Power mentioned before and I would like to reiterate the incredible speed with which John has and his team including Julie Knapp who who is here the chief engineer at the FCC head of OET the tremendous speed at which they've moved this through in less than two years to a to circulate a very detailed FNPRM which is you know close close to a final order although that that won't be adopted for a while yet more comments to come but nevertheless I mean if you compare it at the TV white space where the original notice of inquiry was in 2002 and it took about a decade altogether so this is really a new a new world for the FCC and we're very happy to be the beneficiaries of that sort of you know competent management and and passion so John thanks Michael and thanks to New America for hosting this I want to thank all again all the people who worked on the p-cast many of them were here and it was it was really great fun working on it I also wanted just to thank Jason Furman I think you know many of us who work in the field always have you know we talk about how technology improves everyone's lives makes things better but it's it's usually just intuition so it's it's very interesting to hear someone connect the dots like like that from you know causally how does how do how does you know this arcane topic spectrum actually affect people's lives and I found that very meaningful personally so I'm here to talk about the how we are at the FCC working to implement the p-cast report we have has been has been mentioned a live proceeding which we started at the end of 2012 which is aimed at creating a new set of rules for a new type of service which we're calling the citizens broadband radio service and it's focused in the 3.5 gighertz band I'll talk about that a little more but you know we are getting to the point soon where we will be able to I think to implement some rules and start to see these ideas in action in a new way and and we're very excited about that so p-cast report everyone I'm sure has read it knows all the recommendations by heart I wanted to point to the single most important part of the report which is always with many many important works is the acknowledgments if you read the acknowledgments you'll see one of the invited experts was our Tom Wheeler who is now the chairman of the FCC so the chairman Wheeler gave a speech almost two weeks ago where he talked extensively about the p-cast report his role in it the 3.5 gigahertz band proceeding and made it very clear this is a very high priority for him he you know said it was not coincidental that he was served as a part of the committee and and is interested in pushing it forward he really believes in the ideas and so that's why those of us who work for him are working hard on it wanted to you know before getting to the p-cast report to sort of credit NTIA our brother agency sister agency sibling agency in the executive branch in 2010 NTIA put out a report which many of you are familiar with which identified new bands that could be available for wireless broadband and this was pursuant to the president's directive to find 500 megahertz for broadband one of those bands that they put on the table was the 3550 to 3650 megahertz band and they recommended reallocating it on a shared basis with the existing systems that live there which are primarily military radar systems that idea created in some sense a platform that could be leveraged in the p-cast report and I'll talk about that in a little bit actually the next slide so one of the one of the just few quotes from the p-cast report I'll just read it our highest recommendation is that the president issue an executive order to prioritize 1000 megahertz of federal spectrum for review and implementation to create the nation's first shared use spectrum super highways the recommendations in this p-cast report are intended to provide a foundation for that goal or to institutionalize it as a model start of the next year for spectrum and then down the page a little bit most promising would be four bands the total 950 contiguous megahertz between 2700 and 3650 megahertz combining these bands with the 3650 3700 megahertz band which is an already licensed FCC band yields 1000 potentially contiguous megahertz or 1 gigahertz of shareable spectrum so I think that contextualize a little bit what's going with 3.5 gigahertz is the first 100 or 150 megahertz in this 1000 megahertz super highway and that's one of the reasons why we think it's important to get it off the ground the heart of the p-cast recommendation of course is this idea of a spectrum access system I think this is a concept that was built on top of a lot of the ideas and work that has come out of the TV white spaces proceeding and obviously that's really formative in an important proceeding the idea basically being that there you know if you look at spectrum management historically it's a bunch of people working in windowless or mirrored windowed buildings in Washington DC who administer rights to spectrum and you know if you want to petition for some of those rights you have to file paper it gets mailed to the agency they a bunch of people study it it takes a long time what comes out sometimes an authorization sometimes a rejection but it's a very you know it's a bureaucratic process I think you can think of in some sense that the spectrum access system as being an attempt to automate a lot of that take advantage of these new inventions called computers to really speed it up and almost in a real-time way authorize access to spectrum in ways that was not possible given the current the current current process and institutions that we have now so the 3550 to 3650 band and the 3650 to 3700 band are the subject of FCC docket 12-354 the citizens broadband service proceeding we have two parts of this of this proceeding there's a main proposal which is the 100 megahertz that was recommended in the PCAST report but we've also have a supplemental proposal that encompasses the full 150 megahertz up to 3700 I think we're very much of the mind that you know provided we can work out the rules in a way that satisfies everyone that there's no reason why 150 megahertz shouldn't be in potentially in play here and obviously the more spectrum you have the more powerful the the proceeding can be in the long run so let's just talk about where we've been quickly we proposed the notice of proposed we've issued a notice of proposed rulemaking in December 12 2012 that had essentially some of the key components of the PCAST framework in it we had a three-tier framework so forth we held a technical workshop in a few months later in March we got comments from the community we heard many things one of the things we heard was that are the way in which we were conceiving of the second tier the priority access tier was a little too restrictive for many so we put a focus on that second tier and opened it up to a sort of a broader construct and that was a commission level public notice that came out in November of 2013 and then just this January we held a I would say very successful workshop on spectrum access system what is a spectrum access system what does it need to do how would it work it's a very sort of in some sense technical and challenging topic yet there were people lined up out the door the FCC out the building and it was very well tended and there was a lot of excitement around that it's now we're in April and the next step for us is we are going to at the at the April commission meeting the commissioners will be voting on a further notice of proposed rulemaking now in some sense this sounds like third in a series of notices how exciting can that be but this is exciting let me tell you why the reasons exciting is because the notice that we are proposing that this notice is extremely detailed it contains over 20 pages of draft rules and in fact would create a new rule part part 96 which would establish the citizens broadband radio service and effectively essentially effectuate the PCAST report so this is very much I think an action oriented release of course has to be voted by the commission so everything I'm going to say is with that caveat that what we have in front of the commissioners now is a staff recommendation and draft but they're of course free to make changes and but you know it's definitely at a stage now where I think we're we're tilting towards action we'll have more comment when this thing is voted out the door if it is voted out the door but then I think there'll be enough specificity in the in the proposal that it's a very clear line of sight to getting to an initial set of rules so before I could see just a little bit further in the speech I mentioned before that chairman Wheeler gave about two weeks ago he mentioned a few sort of principles that informed the drafting of this further notice I just wanted to repeat them quickly because they're definitely pervasive throughout the item first the the further notice is definitely organized about around this notion of three tiers a three tiered model just like the PCAST report second it conceives of a unified band across the hundred or hundred fifty megahertz it's not split into sub bands I think there's a general view that the spectrum sharing opportunity raised by the PCAST is one that is across larger bandwidths rather than smaller bands and in fact is in some ways going against the history of spectrum allocations which is towards very narrow channels and allocations third is a sense of flexibility so the original notice that went out about a year and a half ago focused on small cells I think we definitely continue to think that small cells will be a core use case of the band and especially because they're so efficient from a spectral it we have a great interest in spectral efficiency and spatial reuse is a great thing but one of the things the record that came back said very clearly to us is that many interested stakeholders have a broader vision for the band that goes beyond small cells and so rural uses backhaul uses question is how can they be made compatible with one another and so that the further notice definitely anticipates a broader set of uses than in use cases than just small cells and lastly is this notion I think that in some ways Jason Furman alluded to a little bit which is that it's great to have good technology and new ideas through technology but we also need to have an economic frame as well so we put a fair amount of thought into into how does this proposal read from an economic standpoint and you know I think it's the chairman's belief that you need to have this combination of new technology and smart technology but also smart economics to make sure the incentives are right for people to use the technology and in the right ways and so that's embedded into the framework as well so this is the your guide to the rest of the PowerPoint that there essentially is a representation of the of the further notice and also in some sense of the PCAST report you've got your three tiers of service and off to the side the spectrum access system which is of course governing the rights and adjudicating between three tiers we rename things a little bit in the FCC version of the of the PCAST concept and the part of that has to do with just a conflict of terminology and trying to avoid confusing double use of words that mean one thing in regulation that might not have been intended in the PCAST report but the top you have the incumbent access tier these are the people who are that are there already that need to be protected in these bands the priority access tier is this you know quality of service licensed here I'll talk about that a minute and a minute in the bottom maybe and perhaps appropriately the the broadest part of the triangle is the general authorized access tier which is in some sense like an unlicensed access model we in in our case we in this case we've actually proposed a slightly different legal mechanism but the effect is essentially do allow for a democratic access to the band with small d in the sense that anyone can just turn on the device and use it and the spectrum access system of course is is is regulating this whole thing so talking about incumbent access what's in the band now you've got military radars you've got a small number of satellite earth stations and essentially what the proposal would say as it's drafted now is that the bottom tiers of service have to protect those incumbents they get protected that's simple as it is and then there's some details about how that protection happens the next chart is a chart from the 2010 fast track report many of you have seen this report which shows different estimations of what sharing might look like to accommodate the military radars I think it's worth noting that this chart was it was drawn based on analysis that was based on some different technical assumptions I think that most people think will apply to this band I think that many of the people involved in making this chart understand that and so I think there's a sense that we will hopefully you know reengage with this analysis they did a very fast was called the fast track report they did a very fast time period and our hope is that you know after the further notice goes out but prior to order we'll be able to evaluate reevaluate that analysis in light of some of the new technical findings including a set of really interesting studies that are being sponsored by industry and by go and by NTIA on how broadband technology can share with military radars in this frequency range speaking about priority access very quickly this would be a tier of access that would appeal to broadband commercial broadband users that need some kind of quality of service guarantee again we've conceived this as being very technically flexible not just small cells that could be other types of uses as well we've recast it from the original proposal to be more open in terms of the eligibility so essentially anyone who's qualified to hold an FCC license would be qualified to apply for this tier of service and I think again kind of tying back to what Jason Furman was talking about we are definitely thinking about this as an opportunity to think anew about our auctions about how to resolve competing applications for spectrum whether there's a way to do it in a lightweight more dynamic way and so this will be an opportunity for innovation invention just like on the economic side that's also happening on the technology side at the core of this priority access here is this notion of a priority access license or POW think of these as like Lego blocks of spectrum they're sort of standardized units in space time and frequency I wanted to call them priority access unit licenses or Paul's that some of you may know Paul Powell is the sort of complete attorney on this thing he vetoed that there's his chance to have a his name in history I guess but anyway so but think of this as a as a you know a very sort of the fundamental unit of licensing in the band it would be granular so we think of them as relatively small by spectrum standards a shorter time durations that people are maybe accustomed to smaller geographies and some standardized amount of bandwidth perhaps 10 mega yards they would be aggregable so if you need longer time horizon for for your use you can acquire multiple years if you need more geography you can acquire multiple area licenses that are contiguous or non-contiguous and if you need more than 10 mega or so you can acquire multiple frequency chunks the idea is allow the with you taking advantage of the fact that the spectrum access system can handle a large number of licenses make it very flexible to accommodate a wide different a widely divergent set of use cases and frankly and lastly they would also be trade so the idea is that they would one of the thoughts here is that we would like to you know spectrum has a lot of administrative requirements associated with if your spectrum licensee of a lot of filing obligations paperwork so forth and the idea is we want to try to find ways to streamline secondary market transaction transactions with respect to these pals so you ascend essentially end up almost with a commodity exchange of pals and at the limit you can have people on the outside of the SEC inventing new auction models and exchange models to allow some of the more dynamic spot market pricing concepts and things that others have come up with and and you don't have to wait for the government to do it it'll be up to people on the outside to implement that in the private sector to do that that kind of work okay and then general authorized access the notion here is that it would be licensed by rule that's in a sense it's a different legal mechanism but has many of the same characteristics as an unlicensed use as I mentioned before again same level of technical flexibility could use it for all kinds of different technical applications GA must protect other tiers above it including the priority access tiers and GA users also have to accept interference from other GA users in the draft notice there's this concept of a minimum floor of nationwide availability of GA to ensure that there's always some GA spectrum available this was in our public notice from last fall as well and also the concept that the GA could operate in places where the PAL is not active so that when PAL spectrum is not being used it reverts to GA increasing the the use and this is a concept I think Michael's probably been the number one champion of as far as I'm aware he talks about it all the time and then finally the spectrum access system you know just a few facts it's sort of modeled on our TV white spaces system the draft rules that we came up with are taken from that experience so we took advantage of the 10-year experience and boiled it down to a few months but we had to add some things and we'll see where that ends up as the comments come in very dependent on this notion of geolocation open to the idea that there will be multiple third-party private sector database and spectrum access system administrators and that they will need to coordinate with each other which is going to be challenging frankly because there's a lot more to coordinate than in the TV white space domain and the idea behind this and I think this is an idea that several of the commenters proposed to us along the way is that this can kind of create a race to the top kind of dynamic where you've got different private sector administrators coming with their own ideas of how to implement things and trying to build you know faster, better, cheaper SAS systems that can extend the range of capability so looking ahead where are we we are looking at least where I said we're looking very much to the two April 23rd which is the commission meeting the commissioners just received a draft of this proposal as I said it could change the dolly went away and on with some of their concerns after it's voted out if it is voted out there'll be a comment cycle, a healthy one so that we can get detailed comments on our detailed proposals and then simultaneously as the comments are coming in we expect to be doing more work with NTIA and DOD on the relationship with the incumbent federal users and hopefully we'll be able to involve the industry in that as well so that we can get the benefit of a lot of the technical knowledge that comes out that's outside the government. That's where we are. Thank you very much. Thanks John. So we can ask I guess everybody you all to come back up up here because we're going to have just you know some comments, some brief comments by our PCAST members and invited experts. People who actually went through this process and did the work and I'll I'm just going to introduce me introduce you know Mark, Craig and Milo just just and you can go right down right down the line and just you know kind of give us your your retrospective as well as kind of looking forward in terms of what you've heard today. So Mark Warrenberg is of course a member of PCAST and also founder and managing director of Zeta Venture Partners. And I should note that John mentioned Tom Wheeler speech last week Monday and Chairman Wheeler singled out Mark wasn't there but he singled him out by name and praised him for his tireless and collaborative leadership of this effort and in bringing it home in a very comprehensive and ambitious way. Craig Mundy is also a member of PCAST and currently senior advisor to the CEO at Microsoft. And of course he's the former chief research and strategic officer and strategy officer of Microsoft. And Milo Medine is is a was an invited expert on PCAST and made a major contribution to the conceptualization and writing. He's vice president of access services at Google where he manages the Google fiber and wireless access initiatives. So I know Mark since you were our fearless leader, if you have a few words. Michael thank you and thank you and Alan for hosting us here today. And and by the way for your leadership as well and all the work that we've been doing I remember the very first time we got together and you talked about the whole notion of sharing. I think your concept was user share it at the time which resonated quite a bit. It was both an honor and a humbling experience to be part of this group. It was truly a collaborative effort. And which included six members of PCAST and 20 what I would call technical policy advisors, economic advisors that helped us along the way. In terms of PCAST members, none anymore than Craig Monday and it's really great that he's here today to share his thoughts. He truly is the one that first brought this idea forward within PCAST which has a very high bar for choosing topics to go after. And you know, because it has to be at the nexus of both technology and policy and feel like it's going to have an impact and truly it was his leadership in pushing the idea forward that even got it on the table as well as sort of all the architectural ideas that he brought forward in the framework that really led us to where we are today. And Milo of course in terms of I think really being the forward thinker on what became termed the SAS, the spectrum access system, the three tier system and we as geeks called it a geolocation database and of course brought it into PCAST and Eric Landers said, I don't, what is that? What does it do? Well, it gives you access to spectrum. Why don't you just call it a spectrum access system? So it's very amazing that that term actually stuck, you know, and here we are today with that term. You know, Tom and John have just been tireless in their work and they've already outlined the report as well as the amazing work they've done to to to put their own body English on it and make it real, both through the amazing rulemaking that started really with Chairman Jedokowski's speech back in September 2012 and then the vote by the commissioners right in December unanimous vote by the commissioners in December that year. And of course, Tom, who is truly the architect of the presidential memorandum that came out in the middle of 2013 and is really sort of the day to day leader of the work that's done on the spectrum policy team. And I will say it was really pleasure to see Mike Marcus here who at the very first meeting that we had, dogged us about this idea from the 70s of the importance of having leadership in the White House and sure enough, here we we move forward with that. The work by the FCC tack was really instrumental as a sort of adjacent group while we were working on this report. And it is very serendipitous that the the chair of the Technology Advisory Council, the FCC at the time was Tom Wheeler. So there's been huge continuity, I think from the work that went on at that time back in 2011 2012, you know, to hear we are today. So I'm not going to go through the report per se. I don't think after these talks that that's really something that you need to hear. But I do want to tell you some of the things that excite me going forward. One is I'm very excited that what we're doing is actually an evolution of the technologies that were already there. These are not new revolutionary technologies that are the impediment to actually getting things going forward. This is truly an evolutionary path, which is why we were able to get things up and running so quickly. The new ideas that people have, they'll come along, they'll make it even better. They'll make it even better. But they are not necessary impediments to to moving forward with it. The second one is that the, you know, when the PCAST report was being worked on, the broadband, the the national broadband plan came out two years earlier. I think Blair 11 is here who was really the sort of writer and sort of leader of that report. And at that point in time, the NTIA was tasked to come up with bands. And the first one they put forward was the 3.5 band. And of course, using the old rules, it wasn't commercially viable. And so it sat. Well, then as the PCAST ideas came forward and and started to be brought forward by by all the different folks involved, particularly over at the FCC, the commercial world got excited about it. So that's 150 megahertz that really is on the table now for commercial use that truly was not on the table for commercial use just before. And that's just the beginning. And I think John outlined this in his comments that came right out of the PCAST report that this is just the start of many bands. The NTIA is hard at work. And so I think we'll see a lot more spectrum come forward, particularly as we work through this process with 3.5 and start to show success in it. The second thing that most that excites me is that industry is really stepped up. And we'll be a strong part of this and is already working on ideas in this area and building prototypes and building systems for this. And I'm sure we'll hear a little bit about that from Craig and Milo. The economic theory that Jason talked about is very exciting to me because once you put this in place, what does that mean? Well, people wondered if we were positive about auctions. We are extremely positive about auctions. We're probably more positive about auctions than even the folks who are involved in designing auctions. Because we have, you know, a vision of auctions being automated. We have a vision of them being routine. We have a vision of them being, you know, basically computer driven. Almost we use the analogy of AdWords, you know, that we're being worked on every day in, you know, Google access systems. So I mean, that's the point where we see spectrum being traded in these sort of medium and short term licenses and the ability to have different kinds of, you know, economic models about them is a very exciting thing. The implementation of the PCAST report will have huge benefits to the federal agencies, particularly the DOD, you know, ensuring continuity of mission and avoiding major costs associated with the changes they had to go through before making spectrum available for the commercial world, enabling military agile systems to leverage commercial products, to simplify a lot of the training and frequencies on a shared basis and to increase US military effectiveness by deploying environments and making it better for them to be able to work and leverage sort of these local systems. And that's something impressed in Marshall's here. He spent a long time on this today at Google before that at DARPA, you know, really espousing a number of these ideas going forward. And then of course, in the model city that was talked about, we've changed, upgraded the wording from test city to model city, because that seems much more appropriate to what we're talking about. And let me just end this by saying that I think this is critical for US leadership. I think this is going to be another piece of this golden age of mobile use, not just communications as we've seen it, but a forerunner to the next 10 years of the proliferation of the internet of things, and small cells and a whole use of wireless that we don't even see today. And I think what I'm most proud of for all of us is that, you know, when we released the report, we thought that we could get meaningful access to shared spectrum within three years. I think that's actually in our site. And that's just an amazing feeling to know you got to work on something that has the opportunity to sort of live to the plan that it had set off. So those are the comments I'd like to make. Craig. Thank you. I want to certainly commend everyone who's been involved in this and especially Mark, he was a fantastic partner to me in in working through this with many people in P cast and like he I'm very proud of of what has been achieved. I was around at the very beginning of what became the TV white spaces work and was one of the steady evangelists that took eight years to get to the vote at the FCC. But it was important because when I thought then and think now about the future of wireless communication writ large, you know, I think what ultimately is required is a complete pretty much wholesale change of how that is done. And in 2000, when we started with the white spaces idea and and how that would be mediated, it was out of desperation, really, because we saw the value of unlicensed spectrum. And we didn't see where we were going to get much more of it, particularly to deal with wider area communication. The Congress had basically just the classical view of auctioning off the spectrum. And as a result, you know, there wasn't much left over none, in fact. And so the white spaces sharing was essentially a way of recognizing that there was spectrum available. It just wasn't going to be available on a traditional basis. And that led to the spectrum access, you know, concept and a number of us performed implementations of that. And I think that it really was a great warm up exercise for this. So when I think of where we are now, once this rulemaking is complete, and many of these processes really hit their stride, I think we will have looked back and seen the white space activity as sort of the crawl model, the crawl phase, that what we're doing right now will be sort of the walk phase. And ultimately, there will be a run phase. And PCAST contemplated that, when it basically said, well, let's get 1000 megahertz, a gigahertz of contiguous and make it into one band into which all of the new models of communication can can be designed and coexist. You know, it was with, you know, quite an almost amazement, I'll say that many of us who worked on this one, we released it in 2012, recognized that it had been literally exactly 100 years from the time that that some of the forcing functions like the sinking of the Titanic, you know, drove the country into the then existing model of spectrum allocation and management. And it hadn't really evolved. And when you think of spark gap radios of the day, you know, as the thing we were designing for, and you look at the capabilities we have in digital electronics, you know, you really realize, wow, you know, we really are squandering a huge amount of utility, simply because we haven't updated the model. So but we also recognize that the world has a huge some investment in in these systems. And so, you know, things like the the spectrum currency concept were really important, because we realized if we're going to make it to the run phase, you know, which is more than just the convenient aggregation of currently adjacent things, and we're going to get to a world maybe 2030 more years from now, where everything has been recast into the new model, you have to contemplate, you know, what is the replacement cycle of virtually all the radios on the planet, including those in space. And so we you know, are not naive in terms of understanding how long that might take. But we definitely have to put mechanisms in place. And to the extent that that all of these things do drive the economy, not just in the classical sense, and at least in my mind, of mobile broadband, you know, which is driving the current use. But in a world where everything is going to be instrumented and communicate. And that will just be how things operate. One of the big costs associated with that, if you didn't have a broad wireless capability, is you'd have to go back and wire everything up. And that in itself, you know, would be a big cost barrier to broad diffusion of this into the society and the economy. And so, you know, I think we're going to have an unbelievably rich use of broadband and wireless communications of all ilk, not just in the ways we see it today, and that that that fertile ground that's created will be exploited by this steady evolution of the technology. And we're really through this mechanism, just in the bootstrapping phase of a complete rethink of what radios will be architected to be, and what we will do with them and where we'll put them. So I think it is a great achievement for the country at this point to be this far along in this short of time. And, and I'm very happy that that we've gotten where we are. So thanks to everyone that's been involved. Well, like others who participate in the effort, it really is amazing to see Tom and john and folks at the FCC move so aggressively on their side, but also Tom power and and the folks on the DoD side and an NTA Larry Strickling and company. I have to admit, when Eric Schmidt asked me to participate in this working group, I sort of said, I don't really want to do that, because I don't think anything is going to happen as a result of this. But he said, no, no, no, there is strong leadership in this White House on this topic. And so I participated and under duress a little under duress. But it turned out to be very worthwhile. It's really great to see the amazing progress. I think folks here who are familiar with the somewhat glacial timeframes that it takes to get spectrum into service in this country on our, I think, share my amazement at the level of leadership and a level of commitment to getting this band into service and this model. I think, you know, the PCAST report created a great agenda for regulators as well as government folks, but also industry, not, you know, allowing industry to come in and really be a partner and spec out and operate these systems. Like the SAS, I think, has been great. We on the industrial side are working hard to try and make it a reality. And as, you know, Craig pointed out, the roots of this are really in the experience and the TV White Spaces database that that system is up and running. There are commercial devices now available that can actually use those, use those bands, and perhaps the greatest testimony to that the viability of the approach is that other countries are starting to adopt that same framework. And imitation really is the fondest form of flattery. I think, from our perspective, we've been, you know, working hard. We have a demonstration SAS system that we put together that operates in 220 megahertz wide channels and a BRS band at our offices in Mountain View. And you can see incumbent users and turning protected users on and pushing GA users out we have code that does that. And we're working on a new code base that we think will be a good candidate for certification by the FCC and hopefully the NTIA and be consistent with whatever rules are adopted by the Commission that can actually make this be a reality in the 3.5 band. I think many folks have said, you know, three five is interesting, but it's too high to be useful. I really think it's important to realize the only way we're really going to get multiples, right, 10x, 20x, 50x capacity in broadband networks, whether they be Wi Fi based or cellular is by densification smaller and smaller cells fed by very high speed networks like fiber. And these bands is where you've got propagation that doesn't go far. It turns out three five is great for that. And so I think the work here to empower both cellular operators, institutions, and and just normal citizens buying retail products to use the band are going to generate a lot of economic benefit. One of the things to I think that I know that was always on John's mind about the use of this band is you can imagine situations where you've got a hospital or an institution, they could take Wi Fi technology, but they're worried about it from being interfered with. Well, now they could actually put protection around that and use that as their own kind of core enterprise institutional system. Or you could actually see them use LTE technology, right, and actually build their own small LTE networks in this band, and leverage all the commercial development there. So I think that it's beyond just the use case of traditional unlicensed and traditional cellular operation. I think that's one of the really exciting things to see that this kind of flexibility and really making the spectrum available on a broad basis can can yield. I think, you know, I think one of the other dynamics here is, you know, allowing operators to choose what model we they deploy their services in. You could imagine a cellular operator starting off as a GA node. And then if it detects in interference, then decide to pay for protection. And so we don't have to have this. I think what PCAST really tried to do is avoid this fight about licensed versus unlicensed and recognize that the spectrum use in the future is really not going to be one or the other. There will be hybrid models. And we want to have a framework, a technical framework and hopefully a licensing framework that really incorporates that. So I think there's a lot of advantages there. And lastly, I just want to say I think there's a lot of advantages to the federal users as well. You know, when I worked for NASA about 20, 30 years ago, the capabilities, the all of the high end R&D and in communications was being done in in the federal sector and military sector. That is not true anymore. And that's all now in the commercial sector. And not having commercial devices in federal bands means that they're isolated from being able to take advantage of the developments and miniaturization and that we all take it for granted and and things like this smartphone. So the ability to actually share federal ban, get commercial equipment that has cost reduced, highly integrated low power and be able to use those devices in their federal operations, I think can yield a tremendous improvement in productivity and capability. Because I know that military forces as well as many federal users, they have increasing requirements for networking and connectivity, not decreasing and decreasing budgets, increasing requirements and pressure on spectrum. I think this approach to sharing where we can really leverage technology in all these sectors, including the federal sector, is going to be very useful. I think three five creates a is an ideal place to start. But I think I think all of us view it as the beginning and not the end. So with that, I went yeah, and I'm really looking forward to when that foundation can be used for the running that Craig talked about, because that's when we're going to get that. And we're going to need it a 100 x capacity compared to today. If we really want pervasive connectivity at higher speeds and affordable prices, we're running overtime. So I just want to go direct to see if we can take, can you all say for a few questions? If we have, I've taken take a few questions, you know, right now from the audience or if I don't know if we have a way to get it from the webcast, but tell us who you're who, you know, who you are when you ask a question as well. So yeah, right back. Millen Bouddhikot Bell Labs, New Jersey. First of all, I wanted to say that because definitely represents a monumental achievement in terms of pushing the new type of spectrum sharing architectures forward and we owe gratitude to all of you for the great work that you have done. My question is somewhat philosophical. I think just to draw on Andy Groves famous code, only the paranoid survive, right? Only the paranoid survive prosper. What is your greatest hope and what is your greatest fear when it comes to shared spectrum ecosystem? Going forward, greatest hope and greatest fear. Well, I'll give you one answer. My greatest hope is that, in fact, we come to appreciate that that the real leverage comes from the wholesale replacement of our of our entire use of spectrum. And while we recognize that that can't happen overnight, we have to internalize that that is the opportunity. And and so my greatest fear, to some extent, is that this thing gets piece mealed apart, you know, into well, we'll do a little here and a little there and that we won't as a society and as a sort of total enterprise as a nation agree that we are ultimately going to force everyone, you know, up to the new model that, you know, my greatest fear is that, you know, people call the convoy problem, you know, that you don't go any faster than the slowest ship in the convoy. And, you know, there's always people who will be reticent or feel they won't make the economic investment to do it. And I just think that, you know, this again will take leadership by, you know, by both the administration in the in the government side and the FCC for the rest of the society, you know, to basically by license expiration or whatever means create the environment where people do realize that it has to be in the plan, that there will be a date certain by which the country and through this effort, the world, you know, comes out the other side in a completely reconstituted model of spectrum utilization. Anyone else? Other questions? Yes, John. John Piha, Carnegie Mellon University. Mark, you mentioned that it's now the model city, which is not something I've heard about a lot about since the report. Is there is there is there activity there and why we expect something in the future? And what what should we hope to get out of it? If it's going forward, well, it's nice of you to ask me, but I'm going to defer that to Tom. Yeah, I mean, there's not been any formal action yet. It's one of the more intriguing ideas from the from the Peacash report. It was something that as we were thinking up or coming up with the initiatives, we wanted to kick off for whatever reason. It was not on that list, but it's been something on the drawing board certainly for a while. And right now it's at an informal stage, but certainly John and I and Julie and folks at NTIA and others are talking about it regularly and trying to figure out what's the what's the right way forward. I think as I briefly said, the the idea here, you know, Mark mentioned we've we've sort of recast it from test city to model city. The idea being there is we don't want it to be just sort of basic R&D kind of testing. We want it to be business models or technologies that are pretty much ready for prime time, but need some more testing at that end of the testing phase. And what you could imagine is some city that wants to stand up to the step forward to participate, who as I said earlier would be amenable to all sorts of cooperation when it comes to granting access to rights of way and easements and things like that. You could imagine some industry consortium or individual individual industry player or academic having one or a variety of ideas coming together and then going perhaps doing an MOU with with the city. And I'm just making this up for now. This is just one flavor of this. But doing an MOU with the city to say we're going to cooperate on this coming to the FCC saying we want an experimental license either for some particular business model or technology or more broad ranging. FCC would coordinate with that with NTIA to the extent that their federal interest involved. So a lot of the pieces are there. We're just trying to sort of think about how do we convene it and be the bully pulpit and push it forward. One of the things that would have to happen to the extent that their federal interest there is protection of them as well as incumbent commercial users depending on what band you're in. And so you could imagine some kind of program office to to manage this to monitor it to study it to feed the data back to the consortium to back to the Boulder Labs where we've got our folks working and you know to protect the incumbents and you know maybe you've got a big kill switch if you need it depending on what's going on and you need to protect the incumbents. I'm like I said this is just this is pretty inchoate at this point. But these are the kind of things we're talking about and then how do we formalize that in establishment. And you know we don't want to be dictating much of this in terms of technology or business models or anything like that. We just want to enable the the private sector to to have as much flexibility to move forward. John I don't know if you've got. Yeah I was going to say one of the things you need for a test city is actually equipment that can operate in the band. One of the nice things about this particular band is you've got 3650 which is already in service as quote lightly licensed. And we would expect those devices which are based on modified Wi-Fi parts to actually come into this band and be available relatively quickly after both the SAS and the rulemaking is done. Typically the kind of highly integrated multi-band radios that you see in LTE cellular service you may take 18 months or 24 months before they find their way into parts that are integrated into handsets. So I think we'll see much more of that kind of initial deployment in using Wi-Fi style devices. But again we could protect them. There are different use models for those and I think we have some opportunity to actually see some things happen pretty quickly once the rules are authorized. Is a question back in the back there. So yeah Anand Sahai from Berkeley and I've got a question relating to this idea of balkanization of the bands. I mean with the TV white space is really kind of leading the way in this style. Is there a thought to once the SAS stuff gets ready in 3.5 to then reunify into a common framework with the TV white spaces to sort of have one style of operation. That sort of is one question. The second question related to the SAS again is to the extent that the SAS is providing essentially a replacement for the old style paper pushing regulation for assignments. Is there a thought to what extent transparency is required in the operation of the SAS. In particular for example core functionality being open sourced. Certain protocols being clearly visible and released, auditable and so on. We'll remember that SAS is the spectrum access system that's being proposed to sort of manage access. Yeah, I mean I think the framework that we're thinking about for the interacting with the SAS is much broader than that of the TV white space model. One of the things we want to make sure we do is you may not have, if you authorize one device into the band in a particular location that may not, that may not mean you can let a thousand other devices into the band and still protect either the reincumbents or the protected access licensees. So the SAS has to be able to handle that. And so I think we need a framework for communication with the SAS, which is a superset of that of the TV white space. That said, there's no reason why that couldn't be retrofitted into that community as well. I think, you know, I think the transparency is an important item because if you have the ability to actually, it's not so much on the code, but as much as being able to see what's registered, the ability to verify that you've got a base station actually operating somewhere, I think that allows a level of sort of public enforcement, I won't say enforcement the classic FCC way. But if somebody says they've got a base station commission and is operating, but there's no RF coming out of it after two months, then I think that breeds a level of interactivity that is hopefully the marketplace will be able to discipline. The other thing I think that helps with that and doesn't require, for example, open source as a way to gain it is we start with the assumption we're going to have multiple parallel implementations that are independent. But for the system to work, they have to be completely interconnected. So if they're sharing everything and they're looking at it, I mean, in a sense, they're auditing each other because if you say, well, I saw these things come in, but why did that happen? You know, the year you have a bug or you have a problem. So I think that the in a sense, having completely parallel independent implementations that have to operationally be integrated and reconciled is probably the best possible way to ensure that the fairness is always there. I just want to say, first of all, I think that's a very insightful, very insightful question. And I hope you will consider at the right time looking at the notice and perhaps responding to it or make sure we're focused on the right issues. I think in addition to the things that were just said, I think one of the key things to remember and people I think as the excitement level about 3.5 has gone up, people sometimes forget this is a ban that is a currently a federal ban with, you know, a lot of incumbent use. And I think one of the, you know, conditions or preconditions for gaining access to that use is trust. And we're not going to have trust if there's not a sense from the federal side that they can validate that the system is behaving the way it should be and, you know, enforcing where it should be. The other thing I would add is that we're very interested, I think, in the extent to which when you have systems deployed, the systems themselves can perform some kind of enforcement-like function. And, you know, I think we had some ideas that were just mentioned about related sort of the back end communication between the SAS providers. But also, you know, the nodes themselves ought to be doing a bunch of measurements. I mean LTE systems do a lot of system measurements. There's no reason why some of that data can't be passed back to, you know, facilitate, automate some of the enforcement. Make sure that base station really is there that says it is where it is. And one other caveat that was in the PKS report is that, of course, and particularly on 3.5, for example, where these federal incumbents generally refers to our, you know, mostly naval radar, is that there's some classified uses that won't be fully transparent and, you know, that will have to be accommodated in terms of the design of the database and possibly even two different databases that talk to each other. And that was part of the discussions at the workshop that John organized. So one last question, but it'll have to be, you know, quick and fire because the person in the back has their hand up from the beginning. Hi, Jen Marks. Without the till-lucent, the GAA and the priority access temporally. And my question is, is there an expectation that with commercial uses sharing with the government that will also be not only a geolocation aspect to it, but a temporal aspect to it so that if there are no ships at port, for example, that some very valuable areas will be opened up. I'm happy to go. Well, I was going to say, I think that's true, but I think it works the other way as well. Is to say, one of the things we need to recognize is these are federal bans and incumbent use may grow, not just shrink. And so the system needs to be able to deal with the fact that a new federal user may come in and invalidate even protected use. So I think those are the kind of things that we need to deal with. In general, the radars, I think their use in even in port is something that's being explored right now with a number of tests. And so I think we'll have good data to base those conclusions on. But ultimately, you'll be up to the user. I mean, whether it's GAA user or a protected user, whether or not they're willing to deal with that kind of temporal use or not. It's a new resource, spectral resource. And if it turns out to be valuable enough, there are some use models where I'm sure that would be fine and others it might not be OK. So we'll just see how that how that evolves. When we did the original report, you know, we recognize everybody kind of recognizes you got frequency historically plus time and space. But but there's actually many other sort of orthogonal ways of separating these things. And and each of them just depends on more sophisticated equipment. And so over time, you know, we think that that, you know, you'll want to get as many dimensions as possible into the spectrum access system, you know, so that anyway, you can divide these things that are, you know, that where they quote don't interfere. I mean, one of the things it also was part of the report and I think is moving ahead to is the idea that now we should have receiver standards. You know, we never had them for 100 years. And that actually, you know, creates lots of problems like the light squared problem and others. And, you know, so if we're going to change all the radios, you know, then ultimately you want to change both ends of this thing such that you can have, you know, much better management of that total non-interfering, you know, environment. And so I think it'll be a great opportunity for innovation there. I just want to add real quick. The idea of starting off conservatively and then optimizing over time I think is a principle that we advocated in the PCAST committee and I think the FCC is taking on, we can do something very simple and very clean and very reliable to begin with and then optimize it with new techniques, reduce the area of protection to what's really required but we can start off conservative and I think be really assured that we're going to get a system that will work. And we don't have to get everything done at the start. Yeah, I just, that was actually, I completely agree with that. I think, especially when you're dealing with, you know, military systems that I think, you know, people who see the world through a broadband communications lens have to remind themselves these are extremely important systems. They do things that you don't think about and don't want to think about. They need to work when they need to work and, you know, I think with good reason that there are concerns about, you know, sharing information about them with, you know, making them somehow continue, you know, key to the, you know, the operation of a commercial system. And I think all that goes to what my logist said that we need to build confidence. We need to take things step by step and, you know, show each step along the way that it works. It can work. There will undoubtedly be some glitches and problems that could be shown that there's a track record of fixing them quickly and moving on. And so, you know, I think some of the more sensitive controversial issues from the federal side are things that may happen a little later in the process. What we want to do, I think, now is establish the framework so that that can roll out over time. All right. Well, that's all very optimistic, I think. All right. Well, I want to give you all a chance to escape here, since I said we're over time and I know a couple of our panelists have planes to catch and other things. But please join me in thanking all the speakers. And thanks to you all for engaging in such a geeky time.