 So both our commissioners are here, so we will go ahead and get started. Welcome to New America in our policy forum today, Next Generation Wi-Fi, Accelerating 5G for All Americans. My name is Michael Calabrese. I direct the wireless feature program here at New America. It's wireless features part of our Open Technology Institute. And I see quite a few familiar faces, so I won't talk about what we do. I will talk about this new, exciting wireless environment that we are in the process of creating right now. The race to 5G is, and I should put quotes around that, right? The race to 5G is increasingly the number one policy priority at the Federal Communications Commission. And increasingly influencing other debates as well. For example, President Trump has called winning the race to 5G an economic imperative and has announced a ban on the Chinese company Huawei citing concerns about the security of 5G networks and devices that will soon begin connecting everything in our society, not just smartphones or laptops. 5G wireless networks will be characterized in general by much higher throughput, enabling gigabit fast speeds by much lower latency, that is the delay between transmit and receive less than five milliseconds. And by the ability to connect a much larger number of devices in a small area, not just smartphones, but everything in your connected home or office, you know, from appliances to your cars. This Internet of Things connectivity is the real game changer. What you'll hear today is that NextGen Wi-Fi networks will have all of these same 5G capabilities. Wi-Fi will be gigabit fast, low latency, enable to connect a large number of devices, and even prioritize those that are mission critical. Today, unlicensed Wi-Fi is an essential complement to licensed mobile 4G networks. Wi-Fi is the reason warnings of a spectrum crisis a decade ago never occurred, despite a roughly 40% year over year growth in wireless data. Most consumers don't even realize that 70 to 80% of the total mobile data traffic flowing over smartphones and tablets never touch mobile carrier networks at all and never touch licensed spectrum. Most mobile data uses Wi-Fi to travel a short distance over shared unlicensed spectrum and into the fixed broadband connection that most homes and businesses buy from a cable company, a wireline telco such as Fios, or a wireless Internet service provider in more small town and rural areas. And just as Wi-Fi is central to today's wireless ecosystem, NextGen Wi-Fi will be a complement to 5G mobile networks. In fact, as you'll hear, NextGen Wi-Fi will make 5G services more rapidly available and far more affordable, not just in cities and inner suburbs, but to every home and business nationwide. Because mobile 5G networks are massively expensive to deploy, they won't be available outside urban and high traffic areas for many years. Wi-Fi 6, by contrast, can upgrade connectivity in any home or business that has a gigabit-capable fixed broadband service as more than 80 million cable subscribers already do today. In other words, NextGen Wi-Fi can bring 5G capabilities more quickly to urban, suburban, and rural areas alike, but there is a big if. The if is whether the FCC gives America's homes and businesses access to enough contiguous unlicensed spectrum, particularly indoors where they need it. Today you'll hear why the FCC's efforts to open more unlicensed spectrum at 5.9 and across the entire 6 GHz band, more than 1200 MHz of new unlicensed spectrum capacity, is key to unlocking the potential for the US to truly have the world's most robust and equitable 5G wireless networks. So next up we'll have an opening overview presentation so that we all have kind of a clear picture of what this trend is because this is not just another evolutionary step, like going from Wi-Fi 8 of 2.11 N to AC, for example, but a big leap. And that'll be V.J. Nagaranjan who I'll introduce momentarily. Then commissioners Michael O'Reilly and Jessica Rosenwurzel will join me up here for a discussion, a kind of a fireside chat without the fire. And then finally a panel of four industry experts to talk about all, and not just industry also, I shouldn't leave out schools and libraries and public spaces which will be included in our discussion, to wrap it up along with your questions and comments. So let me, I guess at this time, make sure that one thing I'll make sure V.J. is right here. I think they were also so interested, catching up with each other here. We bring them out. Okay, we've got the whole crew. So to start us off is V.J. Nagaranjan who is the vice president of marketing for Broadcom's wireless communications and connectivity business unit, where he's responsible for Broadcom's Wi-Fi Bluetooth and GNSS products. And I believe Broadcom is the world's largest Wi-Fi chip maker, roughly. Yeah, yeah, so they make the stuff we need and know all about it. So I'll turn it over to V.J. Thanks. Thank you, Michael. I'm trying to get my presentation going. Anyway, so while the technical difficulties are resolved, let me just get going. It's a great pleasure for me to be here to give you my perspectives of next generation wireless and, more specifically, the role of unlicensed band and Wi-Fi for, say, 5G services. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Broadcom, Broadcom's one of the largest semiconductor companies. We've more recently forwarded into software as well. We do have a large footprint in the wireless space. We do RF front-end filters for 4G and 5G phones. Then we also do Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS that go into your phones, tablets, access points, cable gateways, and so on. That brings me to the topic of the day that I thought I'll discuss with you, which is the role of Wi-Fi in the 5G era. Let's see if this goes now. There. Okay, good. That's fine. So as we look at, and this is slow, as you look at the evolution of Wi-Fi, this is a chart that I like to show to people. So it's been 20 years of Wi-Fi. We're celebrating 20 years of Wi-Fi this year. And it started from, say, two megabits per second back in the days all the way to multiple gigabits per second. And it has, over these years, manifested itself, marked itself to support multiple, multiple use cases. So 11b, 11g was, say, designed to support basic internet access, say, email. And as we migrated from 11b to n, which is now retroactively being called Wi-Fi 3, Wi-Fi 4, we have support for email and reasonable web browsing. The turn of the last decade saw a lot more video consumption taking place among consumers, not just on your phones, your tablets, or PCs, but also in a new class of devices. And 11ac or Wi-Fi 5 took that head on. It tripled the throughputs, increased your coverage substantially, and really enabled the video consumption revolution, so to speak. So you now have the likes of Chromecast and Roku boxes and so on, which stream video to you at your world, all possible only through Wi-Fi. And as we go to the next generation, as we're looking at newer and newer services, call them, you know, new gen services or 5G services. Wi-Fi 6 is a technology that's been designed bottoms up to support all of that. You see that it not only supports the traditional use cases of email and web and video. It supports a broad range of use cases for a much more broader network or many more users, so to speak, simultaneously. So much that 80% of your mobile data today or your wireless needs are actually on Wi-Fi. And the number varies depends on who you talk to, but, you know, long story short, a majority of your wireless needs today are being met by Wi-Fi. And yet, I think, with all the coverage that has happened around 5G, with a lot of perspectives that have been published around 5G, oftentimes the question comes up on whether Wi-Fi will decline as 5G grows. And when somebody asks me that question, my resounding answer is no, it just cannot, just cannot. And let me use that context to also sort of explain the future of Wi-Fi what it holds for you and to cast it in the light of everything you've heard about 5G. From my vantage, 5G refers to any technology that meets a certain set of key performance indicators for the next generation use cases. Could be very low latency, could be very high speeds, higher coverage, higher mobility, and so on. And the 5G service's vision, right, is basically a bunch of use cases that allow you to have higher data rates. Being able to support IoT, which is a whole number of devices in a very small area. Having a very, very low latency, which would allow us to support mission-critical applications and also some extremely, I'd say, the new gen use cases that the consumers want to have. There's high mobility in cars and there's also the need for more energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency. All of these, as I see it, sort of makes up for the 5G vision. If you look at how that is being addressed as a technology, cellular 5G, which is what 3GPP is defining, is something that supports these 5G services by using different bands. We call it low, mid, and high. This is only part of the picture. The good news is that the definitions from the cellular side definitely meet the KPIs that are desired by 5G, or desired for 5G services. However, spectrum propagates differently. You have the physical characteristics of wireless channels, or such that as you go higher and higher in frequencies, the propagation is restricted to a much smaller area. As a result, this creates the need for a much higher investment in terms of deploying 5G services and also brings up a question of whether seamlessly of these next generation use cases is even a possibility. The answer really comes in the form of Wi-Fi. You have all these different frequency bands having different coverage areas, but you have Wi-Fi that exists in every home. That is ubiquitous, and that's something that you use on a very, very regular basis. Wi-Fi provides you with a very, very cost-effective mechanism to offer cover for 5G cellular services. It not only helps you service the urban environments, but it helps you establish these 5G services in rural America as well. It helps you provide 5G services for devices that don't necessarily have cellular 5G. It really creates a complement for everything that is being talked about in the context of cellular 5G. And then you would question as to whether Wi-Fi really meets the KPIs that are being defined by the 5G vision. Yes, it's ubiquitous, but does it meet the 5G needs? As it turns out, Wi-Fi 6 or 11AX, which is the current generation of Wi-Fi, definitely meets a lot of these KPIs for indoor and dense urban use cases. Let's take a few examples. High speeds. With Wi-Fi 6, we can offer 10 gigabits per second or more depending on the configuration. High speeds possible, social, video and cloud applications as a result. Low latency. Because of how Wi-Fi 6 is designed, because it's a fundamentally different design that uses the concepts of OFDMA and other multi-user technologies, it really enables low latency communication that is very critical for some of these advanced use cases. There's power efficiency, higher capacity and more coverage, all of which come from the fundamental redesign of Wi-Fi 6. As a result, this is how we see the overall 5G vision, right? So there's 5G services that we all talk about that everybody's talking about. And there are two technologies, a cellular 5G and there's Wi-Fi 6 that are really complementary to each other in offering those services seamlessly. And what is also happening in the industry is the ability to seamlessly roam, but when 5G and Wi-Fi 6, thereby creating that continuous user experience for everybody. The summary here is that billions of Wi-Fi-enabled devices will get access to these 5G services, whether they have cellular 5G or not. So with 5G and Wi-Fi 6, there is an opportunity to go bridge this digital divide together. So cellular networks can offload to Wi-Fi 6, and at the same time, there's also an indoor complement where outdoor happens on cellular. Indoor, almost all your devices are going to be on Wi-Fi. So that is the digital divide that can be bridged. If we look at these two technologies in tandem, together with one another. So what's next? So as we move from where we are today to what we're looking at on a going forward basis, we're looking at Wi-Fi in the 6GHz band. Let me describe that or the benefits of 6GHz Wi-Fi in a couple of slides here. So again, next-gen Wi-Fi 6 with 6GHz is, once again, 5G services from the bottom up. So we're able to get wider bandwidth, able to realize the value of wider bandwidth with 160MHz if 6GHz becomes available. It's 2X the bandwidth, 2X the throughput. There's more spectrum, up to 1.2GHz of spectrum available. The 6GHz band that we could make use of. And lastly, there's also the concept of fully scheduled traffic, where we're able to very, very optimally service all the devices that operate in the 6GHz band, enabling a very efficient use of that spectrum. Even more efficient use of that spectrum than has been occurring in the 2.4 and 5G band today with Wi-Fi 6. 160MHz really helps build on top of the stability that Wi-Fi 6 offers. So today with Wi-Fi 6, because of these multi-user concepts, a lot of our customers, a lot of people are adopting Wi-Fi 6. They're getting the stability that they want because they're getting throughputs, much better throughputs across the whole home, across the enterprise, and they love the stability that Wi-Fi 6 is creating. 160MHz will key in on top of that and enable those consumers to have much wider bandwidths and therefore much higher throughputs, lower latency communication. This can be deployed both in apartments and dense apartments and single-family homes. Now, if you look at 6GHz, it really brings 160MHz to life. Today we have 260MHz channels being available in the 5GHz band, both of which are limited by DFS, that we have to make sure that we're complying with DFS, and therefore it's not really used as much as we would like it to be. 5.9 does give us one more 160MHz band, but if you look at 6GHz, it affords us up to 760MHz channels that would really, really enable us to capitalize on the goodness that Wi-Fi brings to all of you. With 6GHz, it's also a green field because you see that there are no legacy devices in the 6GHz band. There's legacy devices in 2.4, there are legacy devices in 5GHz that have to contend with 11AX, but with 6GHz, it's just going to be new devices that are 6GHz capable, but there are AX capable as a result of which you're able to fully schedule traffic in 6GHz band. So it's all OFDMA, it's all multi-user communication, therefore it's that much more efficient when you're talking 6GHz Wi-Fi. And it'll also be the most efficient and friendliest technologies as yet because the airtime overhead is substantially reduced in the 6GHz band. So because these are just newer devices, it eliminates about 70% of the overhead required for communication. And these devices can communicate in a much more lower and much more effective power levels than they are doing so today. So they're going to be less nice here, more friendly. So this is going to be the most efficient Wi-Fi technologies yet when 6GHz band becomes really, really available. As a result, if you look at the relative comparison of the key performance indicators between 2.4, 5 and 6, we do get double the throughput or more. So double the throughput just in raw rates, but in capacity and in average rates much higher than 2X throughputs as we go from 5GHz to 6GHz. Range is going to be lesser simply because of the physical characteristics of 6GHz as compared to 5, but the latency is also going to see a substantial improvement going from 5GHz to 6GHz. So then if you step back and look at the so-called 5G use cases or 5G services and see which of those Wi-Fi can aptly service, you can see that most of these use cases that I've highlighted and pulled are use cases that can actually be serviced by Wi-Fi 6, especially with 6GHz being available, especially with us being able to realize the value of 160MHz. If you dive in to a little more detail, there's very low power Wi-Fi, which would help us get about 2Gbps of throughput with sub millisecond latency at a distance of say 2, 3 meters. And these are newer use cases that can be enabled with that class of device. We're looking at, everybody is talking about AR and VR, and most of the AR VR devices today are cabled. They need a cabled connection to the computing device that has to generate all of the content and provide to the head-mounted device. But if we can get enough bandwidth, if we can get enough capacity at short range at very, very low latencies, that can translate into a wireless AR VR device that would be, say, very appetizing for a section of our future consumers. There are also other use cases such as in-vehicle entertainment that becomes very interesting for this class of device, which is the very low-power class of devices. The other thing, specifically on the 6GHz band, also errs the low-power indoor type of devices. Now, if we can guarantee about one to one-and-a-half gigabits per second up to a range of seven meters, what that effectively means is you're getting gigabit throughputs across your homes, whether it is a single-family dwelling or a multiple-apartment complex. So all of these could be, you know, supremely game-changing when it comes to the future of Wi-Fi, future of Wi-Fi 6, and also this 5G eta. With all of that, and I turn to our friends from Cisco when I refer to the VNI, you know, with all of that, you can see that even in the 5G eta, we expect more than 70% of your data to actually go through Wi-Fi. That's not going to change. So, you know, I'm coming a full circle here to answer the question as to why there is no demise of Wi-Fi in the 5G eta if anything is going to thrive. And even in 2022, Cisco says we're going to have, again, 80% of your data needs being met by Wi-Fi. So all said and done, Wi-Fi is going to be a very critical part of your future, very critical part of your, you know, wireless life, very critical part of the 5G eta. So with that, I would like to conclude my talk by saying that in order for us to fully, fully unlock the benefits of Wi-Fi, especially in the 5G eta, more spectrum would be useful. Six gigahertz is the best bet for us. Now freeing it up will really help us generate or get to this Wi-Fi superhighway, if you may. It will absolutely enable these 160-megas channels, and as I said, that is very critical to realize the full value of these 5G services. And if the NPRM is approved, then we could have up to 760-megas channels in this 1.2 gigahertz band. With that, I conclude my talk. Thank you. Thank you. So next, we'll bring up commissioners Rosenworst and Noel Riley. Join me up here. Great. Well, thanks for doing this. So I always love it when these two are together, because it's our bipartisan dynamic duo. So I meant to mention this at the top. I'm not going to read through everybody's bios, not only because you're familiar, especially with these two, but because we handed out bios summaries. But I did want to mention that they do have a few characteristic things in common. Both have long experience on the FCC since commission Rosenworst first joined and first was confirmed in 2012 and commissioner O'Reilly in 2013. They both were deeply involved in these issues on licensed spectrum and Wi-Fi as senior staffers on Capitol Hill before they even joined the FCC. And they're both currently the leading champions in government for this vision. I think that you just saw for more licensed and unlicensed spectrum for a very broad-based 5G ecosystem. So we'll ask some questions and then I don't know if there's time if you're willing to take a question or two from the audience, but we'll try to want to keep this to 30 minutes. So first of all, as we just heard, Wi-Fi today is already critical to connectivity and affordability, carrying 70 to 80% of mobile data traffic flowing over smartphones and other mobile devices. So do you see, you know, I guess you saw this presentation. Do you agree, do you see Wi-Fi continuing to play a key and complementary role in a 5G wireless ecosystem or is, for example, sometimes there are suggestions that, you know, a mobile carrier 5G world will sort of eliminate the need for Wi-Fi? You're in the center. Okay, I'll go first. So I agree with the presentation and I would actually say that in the last many years there's been this vision that Wi-Fi competes with licensed spectrum or unlicensed and unlicensed compete. And I think in a 5G universe that doesn't happen, you're going to see much more complementary roles. They're going to intertwine very smoothly and we're actually trying to figure out, you know, seamlessly was the word used here. I'm effortlessly and maybe even consumer unknowingly switch between the two as the communications and the enterprise users are the same. So I'm excited about what Wi-Fi 6 brings. I'm excited about 5G and the combination of those two together is going to be really beneficial for consumers. Wow, I agree with everything my colleague just said. And the truth is that our demand for Wi-Fi is growing. I mean, there's data out there that now say that within the next four years it will contribute more than $3.5 trillion worth of economic activity globally and a million new jobs. We should seize that and make sure that this growth continues. And it's not even just about numbers. I think Wi-Fi has been this place for innovation. It's in its DNA. And that's because there's low barriers to entry with unlicensed spectrum and it's the perfect sandbox for experimentation. That kind of permissionless innovation in our skies is something we want to continue to grow. We want to make sure that it thrives going forward. Yeah, that's a great point. It's almost often lost sight of is that Wi-Fi grew up on what was once considered junk. Yeah, like carpet remnants or something like that. They were the pieces nobody knew what to do with. And look at what an incredible innovation economy it's created. We've got to make sure it continues. Okay. So you've both been leading champions of Wi-Fi and the unlicensed spectrum that fuels it for many years. What are some of the use cases? When you look forward, what are some of the use cases and benefits of next-gen Wi-Fi that you have this particularly excited you or motivated you to push this to market? You know, I'm really excited about the innovation of things that comes when we connect a lot of our industrial equipment. I feel that honestly we talk about the Internet of Things and we talk about my toaster talking to my refrigerator and honestly that's not interesting to me. What is interesting to me is that if we grow this connectivity with the Internet of Things when it comes to industrial equipment we can improve worker safety and we can use our scarce resources in the world around us more efficiently and effectively. And I think that's going to have broader economic and environmental consequences that we should all embrace. Well, I would add to that productivity. I think that is something workers need but productivity would really increase. What I'm excited about when I examine what Wi-Fi 6 is going to bring it is the addressing of the congestion in a room such as this or in your house when you're talking about number of devices. You know, it went from like one phone or one laptop. Now I've got like seven myself and my daughter's got one and my wife's got five and trying to handle all of that at the same time. Well, that's what Wi-Fi 6 is built to do. Address the speeds and the productivity and the functionality within such a congested universe whether it's a small household or an enterprise. And I think that's what's really exciting and providing the throughput that we need going forward and I think that's what this release is going to be able to do. Okay. Great. So as you've just heard, the Wi-Fi 6 standard is finalized and ready for use, often referred to as 802.11AX although the Wi-Fi Alliance... It just rolls off the tongue, right? Yeah, exactly. It took me years not to be confused with that alphabet soup, so... And now they changed the name, now that you figured it out, right? I know, I'm not the smartest guy anymore. So it's become easy. Wi-Fi 6 is what the Wi-Fi Alliance wants us to call it, so that's fine, that's easy. So I've joked that Wi-Fi 6 is a recipe for 5G capabilities for every home, business, and venue, just add spectrum. So how do you explain, you know, to your colleagues and others why the unlicensed spectrum we already have, which seems to be, you know, quite a bit, why is that not adequate to keep pace with our 5G future? Well, right now, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, we've got about 9 billion devices connected using Wi-Fi. But in the next few years, we're going to have billions and billions more. So how do we prepare for that future? We're going to need to do two things. First, we're going to need more spectrum. And second, we're going to need to make sure that we have wider channels within that spectrum so that we can have Wi-Fi superhighways and really take advantage of the innovation, this kind of use of our airwaves develops. But I would answer your question this way and say, I don't think I have a hard job convincing my colleagues at the commission or in the public in general, those in the policymaking side, the need for additional spectrum, the need for additional bands for unlicensed services. I think that's, you know, pretty much, that ship has sailed in a good way. But it's going to happen. It's just a matter of how and where we're going to go through that process. And that's the tough job that we have. Tough, it depends on the day. But, you know, that's what we're supposed to do. And I think the acceptance is just a matter of, you know, the mechanics of making that happen. Yeah, I really do hope all of our colleagues agree with us that we need more Wi-Fi. The question becomes, where are we going to be able to identify spectrum to make it happen and how soon can we do it? Right. And that's a good segue. Let's talk about the particular bands that can meet this need. First, the 5.9 gigahertz band represents 75 megahertz that the commission set aside 20 years ago for particular use for intelligent transportation services, which lies mostly fallow today. At the end of the Obama, just as background, at the end of the Obama administration, Department of Transportation had noticed a proposal to mandate every new vehicle to have a certain type of radio on board that would communicate for safety signaling. DSRC, it's called. I'll spare you what that is. But that mandate is not happening, and even that standard seems to be slipping away. So, are we going to see the fresh look, notice of rulemaking that you both have been urging anytime soon? This is the idea, now that nothing's happening at 5.9 gigahertz, the idea that the commission has an opportunity to revisit the issue. You go first. Well, I think my record's pretty clear on the topic, but I've learned anything in being the minority and then and now in the majority of the last couple of years. The schedule is decided by the chairman, so I think we'll see what the chairman decides to do in this space in the very near future, and I can't predict that. That's what he gets to do. Well, Mike and I have written about this extensively over the last several years, and I think we both pointed out that, decades ago now, we set aside this spectrum for the future of intelligent transportation, some subsection of it, just for safety. But it turns out that the FCC was not so great at predicting exactly how auto safety would evolve, because 20 years after these airwaves were set aside, we just have a few cars on the road that have dedicated short-range services in them for auto safety. Out of the 260 million cars on U.S. roadways. So it is totally appropriate and reasonable to not strand our spectrum policy and our ideas from two decades ago. It is also totally appropriate and reasonable to take a fresh look at this band and consider how we can make smarter use of these airwaves right now. We've had some discussion for some time about doing that, and I sincerely hope that the agency hasn't lost its nerve. We should move ahead. We should do this. It's been 20 years, and the demands for Wi-Fi and updated spectrum policy are real. And for those of you not following this particular debate closely, we should give Chairman Pi his due. He announced, I believe, just last week, right, in a speech at Wi-Fi now, that the commission would be putting out this fresh look notice, although he then pulled it back after the Department of Transportation asked for a brief reprieve, 30 days to, we're not sure why, but there is a delay until we see it. I think we should find a way to speed this up and not slow it down. It's been a long time since we set aside these airwaves, and it merits a fresh look, and I hope we can do that as soon as possible. So should the, when the notice comes out, should the commission be proposing a specific change, such as looking at other bands where vehicle-to-vehicle safety could potentially move, or segmenting the band, which would be maybe a second best option? There's been proposals for Wi-Fi to use the lower half of the band and for safety to have exclusive use at the top, although it seems like there's reasons now to consider whether consumers could get a win-win by having safety in a different place where it wouldn't be sandwiched by Wi-Fi above and below it. Is there any, are you willing to go out and win this at all? Well, my, the thing that I want to do most is make sure that we start that fresh look and get moving on it. What is interesting about the newer auto safety technologies is their cellular technologies, which have coexisted with Wi-Fi for a long time. So I have some optimism we can find a way forward. I hope the agency does so. Well, I would just add to that that, look, the chairman has talked about, Chairman Pai has talked about having a very broad examination of the issue. I think that's thoughtful, and we can examine all the different ideas that have been put forward. One thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of the safety features that were envisioned in DSRC many years ago have been accomplished. They're just not done in 5.9. They're done elsewhere. And many of LIDAR, a number of different technologies that are implemented in cars today are not done at 5.9. And so we can take them off the list and say, okay, what are we really focused on? What's left that needs to be accomplished in 5.9? And I think that's where the, adds to that conversation that we're going to explore at some point. Yeah, no, and it is one of the ironies for those of you, paying attention to this space for more than two years. These two commissioners joined me when we released a report on this band two or maybe three years ago. And among the many findings were that the companies such as Waymo and Tesla, there were the cutting edge of automated vehicles, had no interest in DSRC or in this type of signaling because of LIDAR and radar and other means that they thought were on a trajectory to surpass it because, and that's why I mentioned the mandate earlier, it takes 15 years for the U.S. vehicles fleet to turn over. And so we won't even know if it's fully, if a radio communication signaling system would be fully, would work until the vast majority of vehicles have it. So DOT, Department of Transportation, has declined to mandate a standard for vehicle-to-vehicle safety communications. And now a new cellular vehicle to everything standard seems most likely to be the basis for car connectivity, in part because the mobile carriers and auto industry are working together to incorporate this into mobile, purpose mobile 5G networks. So how does that impact what's possible here given that cellular V2-X is still in development and seems likely to be integrated with 5G networks more broadly? Does that matter? Go ahead. Well, I don't find the two inconsistent. I know 5GAA has a proposal as a petition before the commission. I don't want to prejudge that. They've also been commenting about what we might do in a new NPRM. Look, there's two different competing standards. We have to figure some of those things out. I don't think it's inconsistent to say that there's a possibility to still have a broad opportunity for unlicensed in that space. We'll have to see what the record comes from an NPRM that's put out there and take a lot of comment and read everything that goes through. But I think there's an opportunity from this vantage point at this time that you can see where everything can fit together. I agree with all of that. Write down. Okay. Well, it sounds like the bottom line is stay tuned and we'll still be talking about this when the further notice comes out. The commission has proposed authorizing, so now we're going to switch gears to 6 GHz, which is the band that begins, right, 1 MHz higher up, right? This is, you saw earlier when Vijay showed how the 6 GHz band, what Wi-Fi is currently operating immediately below this transportation band we've been talking about, and now the commission has proposed to authorize unlicensed sharing of the band that begins immediately above it, the 6 GHz band from 59.25 to 79.25. So the commission has proposed authorizing unlicensed sharing of this unused spectrum in a huge band above 5 GHz, a total of 1,200 MHz across the entire 6 GHz band. However, unlike the dedicated, but now congested 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band, most of the 6 GHz band is heavily populated with incumbents that worry about interference risk. These are mainly high-power fixed links, long-distance fixed links that are used mainly for telecom but also for utilities and public safety. Do you believe that the... I guess I want to ask you how you view the proposal to rely on an automated frequency coordination system. Can an automated database system prove reliable enough to protect those incumbents from harmful interference? I believe the answer is yes, because it comes down to this. We are putting a crazy amount of activity into our skies in this new wireless world. And I think we at the FCC would be crazy if all we did was rely on same-old distribution schemes of exclusive use licenses by taking advantage of sensing technologies, we can start to identify when airwaves are in use and when they're not. And the best evidence we're going to have of that in the near term is our work on the 3.5 GHz band, because we've come up with a way to accommodate in that band military radar, licensed commercial use, and unlicensed use for Wi-Fi. And I think when we can demonstrate that we do that with sensing technologies, we're going to have a model we can export to other bands, and we can go from this world where we believe we have a spectrum crunch to one where we develop abundance by using our airwaves more efficiently using these technologies. So I would agree with a lot of what my colleague says. There's always a slight portion. There's always a slight. You can come over to my optimistic side any time you want. You're known for your optimism. So I would say that ASC is going to be very important and I've worked really hard to make 3.5 GHz happen, both on the PAILs, which we hope to be just momentarily. It's going to be a little bit where every day we're just like, can it be tomorrow, can it be tomorrow? So we're almost there on the, excuse me, on the unlicensed side and on the PAIL side, we're hoping to schedule that auction for next year, working through a lot of different issues. People have said, oh, you've waited too long on that. And the answer is no. We're standing the work we did on changing some of the PAIL license sizes. So I'm excited what we're able to do with AFCs and 3.5. And I think they'll be valued but a number of different places. I don't think they're for everything. We're still going to need cleared bands. We're still going to need licensed spectrum. So it's finding that right balance. I think an AFC makes complete sense in 6 GHz because you have a band that you're not going to export everyone that lives there today. It's not possible. It's a very active, very highly used band. And I think it's something that an AFC makes complete sense for handling that traffic from an unlicensed universe. And opening up that 1.2 GHz that our previous speaker talked about. That's really exciting. We talked about the one channel that we may be able to make available under 5.9. Here we're talking about seven additional channels of the 160 MHz, the broad speeds that we're able to be able to use, make available to consumers. That's really exciting. But it's not something that's going to happen in the immediate. We're working through that item. I pushed really hard to get it. I'm glad that the commission has moved forward to adopt that. But now we are in the comments and now we're in the all the different tests that have been testing and studies that have been submitted. And we're working through that. And that's what you expect out of the commission. And hopefully we're able to close that relatively soon. That's almost optimistic. That's almost. I like it. Yeah. It's important to be optimistic in this game because it's so easy to trot out the worst case corner scenario. Yeah. You know, cynicism and spectrum policy will mean that we won't change a single band plan that we know today. We got to look for ways to be really creative with what's going on in our airwaves. I do think we're doing some of the most creative things we can in these bands for Wi-Fi. And I hope we continue. You both scooted over what I think is an important, really important point here that some in the audience maybe didn't quite catch is that this automated frequency coordination system, this automated database, is something actually a much more complex version of it, like the version in 6 gigahertz that would be needed in 6 gigahertz where everything is static should be fairly simple. But the commission has already provisionally certified a more complex version of this to protect the Navy in the citizens, the new citizens broadband radio service, 3.5 gigahertz. So, I mean, that is supposed... It's really exciting. We've managed for the first time to identify airwaves that have some military use, but we're working with the Department of Defense to make sure that there's also commercial opportunity in that same band. I think that just bodes well for the future to develop a technical and cooperative model and other bands going forward. So, wouldn't you think if it's safe enough for the Navy it should be safe enough for these fixed point-to-point links that aren't moving? I think it makes a lot of sense. I think it makes sense. That's why we teed it up that way. That's why we take comment and replies, but I think you highlight why we can move forward at some point in the near future. Okay, let me follow up on 6 gigahertz with the issue that's most important to... certainly to consumer groups in our public interest coalition. And that is another thing that may have gone over people too quickly was in VJ's presentation. Like everything at the FCC, 6 gigahertz is more complicated than this. There's actually four different band segments that have different incumbents in them. And so, while 1200 contiguous megahertz, 7 160 megahertz channels. This is where the big impact comes. While that would be a huge boost for Wi-Fi, there is a catch, which is that under the FCC's proposal very low-power indoor only use. In other words, where the incumbents could be shielded by the building around you, like in this room, free from database control would be limited to the two smallest band segments and free up only one channel as wide as 160 megahertz. So, I don't know if you're willing at this point in the process to comment on whether there's going to be an effort to overcome that to try to see if we can't get at least at some low-power level indoor only use across the entire 1200 megahertz. I'd like us to do a lot to have more indoor low-power use across all four segments. And there are two reasons why. First, we'd have much greater economies of scale for devices that would really make this band more vigorous. And second, the early data on the record suggests that we can protect incumbents from interference with low-power indoor uses across all four segments of the band. So I hope that the agency takes another look at this and we can make that happen. What I had one addition to yours is that as good as AFCs are, there is a cost to having them and that cost will be driven into whatever technology is used. And so we want to try and reduce that as necessary. So I'm very sympathetic to having indoor use across the band and I think that that's something that the commission should be open about. That's why we take comment, that's why we put out proposals, that's why we see what the record looks like and we had an opportunity to potentially change this going forward. No, that's right. And we've seen that in five gigahertz band where in order to protect military radar there's a kind of a listen and relocate requirement and that's kept everyone away from that particular band segment because it adds a lot of cost to the devices. So one last question and then we'll see if there are maybe one or two from the audience. And that is because this comes up for both of these bands for 5.9 and 6 gigahertz is because all the airwaves, all the good airwaves are already assigned to someone and no matter how sparsely they are using it the incumbents will always say go somewhere else. Not in our backyard, this is too risky, there's some harmful interference. So are there any good options for big wide bands for next-gen Wi-Fi other than 5 and 6 gigahertz? I mean is this kind of our big chance right now or are there other places we could just as easily go and accomplish the same thing? Well, it's important to point out that even if you don't find our interest in having more Wi-Fi on our skies credible that in last year's appropriations law Congress actually directed the FCC to find 100 megahertz of spectrum below 8 gigahertz by the end of 2022 for unlicensed airwaves. So we have a statutory direction to make this happen on top of what I think is a broad-based need in our economy. And so these are the near-term places we're going to look but I think we should always be looking for others. Every time we engage in spectrum policy and we think about licensed spectrum I think we need to think about a Wi-Fi dividend or unlicensed activity because they're really complementary and I think that's going to be true going forward just as it has been in the past. Well, obviously 5.9 and 6 gigahertz are priorities because of all the work that's gone into them and the number of years that people have spent on them. But I think there are other bands as well. I look at TV White Space and how we're regenerated that has been in my career. I started when it was, you know, it was troubled in many days and we worked through some issues then and then it's had its moments and then kind of fell off the radar and now it's coming back. And so I think that's an exciting opportunity. I think 4.9 is a band underutilized by the public safety. They're using, I think, 3.5% of the band. That's 50 megahertz. And so I think there's something there that we can use and I think the innovators that the unlicensed community would be able to opportunity. I have a hard time figuring out how you would do licenses in that band so I think that an unlicensed play makes probably the most sense there. And then I know you're talking lower bands or below 8 gigahertz but I think there are other ones that we're talking about and the chairman's been great in adding new bands above 95 for unlicensed purposes. We have 60 and a bunch of other things that are in play. So we're really trying to add to the portfolio as best as possible to make sure that the innovators and the engineers are able to use their skills and provide services and benefits to consumers. Yeah, and I think the Y gig efforts and the 60 gigahertz band are very interesting right now because we're seeing a lot of licensed activity in some millimeter wave and seeing there's a new standard being developed for millimeter wave activity and the 60 gigahertz band for Wi-Fi is another place to watch. Yeah, for those who don't know that... We're really nerdy right now. That's very high frequency spectrum but it's a huge amount and it's really spurring a lot of innovation right now. So I think we have time for a couple questions. I'm sorry we won't probably get to everyone but tell us who you are when you ask. So how about... Actually, who's got the microphone? Amir, how about in the middle? Yeah. Thank you so much for the panel. I'm Yoyo from Hong Kong Phoenix TV and President Trump is in the UK right now and 5G is one of the issues. He's going to talk with the UK government and I'm just wondering also Secretary Pompeo also talked about 5G with allies a lot especially on China and Huawei. So my question is what's the evidence of Huawei is being a national security threat to the US and also by the Chinese government is criticized by the US for promoting the 2025 industrial policy including development of 5G but President Trump had been intervening by issuing executive orders. So is this good for the 5G development for the US and also around the world? Thank you. It's not relevant to the topic but I'll leave it up to you whether you either of you want to say anything about it. The FCC is an independent body and I leave to the foreign policy and some of the national security concerns to the experts a couple of you indicated are working on these issues. 5G is incredibly important. It does have national security concerns that have been raised in multiple different fronts and we just have to work through them. We have a role in that equation but not the deciding role and we're working with our expert agencies and team telecom to try and address that as best as possible. I'm over here. I'm here with Robert Buskirk with Communications Daily. I wanted to, so I don't want to seem like a downer here but these bands do seem to take a long time. Witness 3.5 and 4.9 and 6 gigahertz we're still in pretty early stages. What are your projections for about how long it's going to take before users are actually going to be able to use the spectrum and are there dangers that in terms of this opposed dangers it's too long in terms of both innovation and also something you talked about Wi-Fi exhaust before. Well I think we're both here working together because we think speed matters. We want to make sure that this happens sooner rather than later but I do think it is helpful that we have this appropriations law from Congress because we are charged with making at least 100 megahertz of spectrum available below 8 gigahertz in the next few years and I think if we want to make that happen we have to get moving right now. Well I would agree with your point spectrum policy is hard and takes longer than you would like. I've been at the commission almost six years and I've said everything that I work on takes longer than I would like. Everything takes an extra two years than it should. Now the 3.5 you mentioned that wasn't because of the work that I did there were other things that we're trying to work through when we're finally getting the SAS's and the ESC's operational working on the auction software has been part of the process in there. So there are reasons and there are things that we're working through at the commission to try and solve these things. I don't think there's going to be spectrum exhaustion. I think that the people who work in this space know it has to happen. We have to figure the right bands to be able to innovate, bring the services that our previous speaker talked about forward and so I'm excited it's going to take us more effort than we would like but that's the way you get all the excitement to do it. Maybe one more. Yes sir, right here. I'm just trying to avoid going on camera. Lieutenant Colonel Ty Lewis from the Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force. So interested in can you describe the environment and I'm talking about like a tactical edge as we're moving to improve our operations using artificial intelligence and machine learning takes a lot of data sometimes when you're doing training. At the tactical edge that could be a problem and if we want to take advantage of 5G, Wi-Fi, 6 what kind of environment does that look like and if we're at the tactical edge are we really getting that if we have to reach back to do some training to maybe colonize wherever we could realize the 5G type of speeds. I'll answer it this way and hope this gets to the point that you're asking. The technology is going to require a lot of effort and it's going to, you know, you highlighted the edge part of the equation which is in 5G we're expecting most of the computing to be moved away from central located servers and more out to the devices and to the technology more closer to the consumers. That's great benefit to consumers. It has tricky things as it relates to national security. But to your point can we really have that fast experience to have the benefits and the case studies that we're expecting from 5G if occasionally we have to go back and connect back to in your case, CONUS in other cases maybe centralized servers and that's something to work through and that's something that innovators are working on every day how much can be put in the edge how much can we move to the device central how much computing can be done outside of the centralized servers that we've had today in that universe. What's going to happen, I think it is trying to figure out how you do that on one frame, that's why people say what is 5G, what are the case studies what's the universe and I think that's all in development but I think I'm really excited about what it's going to bring going forward. Okay, alright Well please join me in thanking the commissioners for coming Thank you Thank you, you can go probably through that door as easiest Okay, so can we get the panel please to come up We'll jump right into that and it's a different list of questions Welcome everyone So we have a great panel here that represents a whole number of different aspects of the coming 5G ecosystem combining license and unlicensed and also I mentioned if anybody wants there's now the panels come up here so now there's empty seats in the front which you're welcome to come and take So I haven't here as I said you have their bios so I'm just going to say the titles I think we'll first up will be David Don the vice president for regulatory policy at Comcast I just want to have each of our panelists just take a few minutes to tell you what's their take on this sort of evolutionary leap forward Wi-Fi 6 and unlicensed in the spectrum we need and I think David's been focused obviously a lot on the home since that's Comcast's business so how do you see this happening? First of all Michael thank you for having me I love being the wire line operator and a wireless panel I always wonder why we get invited to these but actually this one is pretty clear why Comcast should be on a panel like this when you see that previous discussion the last two discussions there's a lot going on in this space and a lot to process but fundamentally we're at the front lines of this we are where this technology in Washington go from being theoretical debates to actually being impacted and impactful to our customers we're the largest broadband operator in the country and we realize that most of our customers equate Wi-Fi with broadband connectivity those little bars that symbol of Wi-Fi no one says oh I have Wi-Fi connectivity they think I have broadband connectivity and as the largest provider in this country we understand the importance of these debates and the importance of getting more spectrum allocated to Wi-Fi to ensure that it meets the capacity of our networks Comcast I can speak for us has deployed gigabit broadband across our footprint we pass over 58 million homes in the vast majority almost the entirety of them all have access to gigabit broadband networks but our customers integrate with those networks using Wi-Fi so it's important for us that Wi-Fi has the capacity and the capabilities to match the capability we're building in the network we understand there are key factors customers look for speed and capacity so when we build this gigabit broadband network they have to actually experience in the home and we do that they're having not only the greatest broadband network but also great Wi-Fi connectivity and we do that through construction of our network and we do that through development of what we call X-Fi which gives the consumer more control more capabilities through their home and then of course more capacity on Wi-Fi so what we think is everything we heard about Wi-Fi 6 is important everything the commissioners raised about 5.9 and about 6 are key to ensuring that broadband experience of consumers remains robust and that's their demand so we think these are important debates and it's important to continue to allocate more spectrum here okay thanks to Mary Brown who is the senior director of technology and spectrum policy at Cisco here in Washington and Mary I think at least one or two references to your visual networking index because you guys are the scorekeepers for the world's connectivity we keep track of a lot of data at Cisco so tell us how this is shaping up and whether Wi-Fi will continue to be important yeah so as Michael said we released at Cisco a visual networking index once a year this year it was in November and we released a mobile one in February trying to keep track of what's happening with IP traffic and internet traffic around the world and in key countries like the United States so in the US by 2022 there will be 49.7 exabytes of Wi-Fi traffic per month and that compares with 5.7 exabytes of mobile traffic per month so that's traffic going over this mobile carrier's airwaves that differences a little short of nine times both ecosystems are going to grow obviously the advent of 5G means the mobile system is going to grow but the Wi-Fi system is growing too in fact Wi-Fi is growing at a 28% compound annual growth rate so the more we have the more power we have in the devices that we're holding and the more powerful the networks whether it's 5G or Wi-Fi 6 the more we're all going to consume it's been happening that way for the entirety of the visual networking index which now dates back more than 10 years and we don't project that that's going to change going forward so one of the things I wanted to talk about very briefly was what does that mean from a consumer perspective now Cisco is an enterprise company we're selling to government to schools to governments we're selling to enterprises one of our biggest customers a set of customers though is in the stadium space and we have a number of large stadiums around the country that use Cisco infrastructure and are transitioning transition to Wi-Fi 5 and are soon to be transitioning to Wi-Fi 6 so how does this change their business how does it change your experience as a consumer when you go to an event in these stadiums well a fully deployed Wi-Fi stadium today you would start off walking in with mobile ticketing right you put your phone down and walk in and those of you in Washington know the Washington national stadium you can do that once you get there you can upgrade your seat off your phone you will have an app from the either the team or the league that will allow you to look at stats of the team teams players or the opposing teams players you will be able to watch instant replays on that app you'll be able to order food from your seat and get pinged when it's ready so you don't have to stand in line you're going to order whatever swag and gear you want to cheer your team on you can do all that from your seat it just changes the whole experience for the consumer and gets them more engaged in the game the key thing from a Cisco engineering point of view is all of you out there in that stadium represent some of the most dense use cases in the world everybody's got their device they all want to share photos of their friends watching the game or that winning a goal at the NBA or at the NHL championship or that home run at the baseball game they may even want to share video and when all of you try to upload at the same time that is really a pain point for your network administrators so one of the things that people are really excited about with Wi-Fi 6 is that's not going to be a pain point anymore it's going to be a wonderful experience I can't wait because I know it doesn't work very well to try to watch a replay my CEO is a big NBA fan and he's complaining all the time about his favorite team in California not having good Wi-Fi in the stadium right now so let's turn next to Susan Bearden who is the chief innovation officer for the consortium of school networking and I think we all know that the 10,000 foot answered this but will this make any difference for schools absolutely I think Wi-Fi 6 is going to be a game changer in education let me tell you why first of all the modernization of e-rate has helped our schools make tremendous progress in terms of actually getting broadband connectivity to the schools the consortium for school networkings annual IT infrastructure survey most recently when indicated that 92% of the school surveyed met the FCC's short term connectivity goals of 100 megabits of connectivity for 1,000 students 35% of the IT leaders surveyed indicated that the districts met the FCC's long term goal of a gigabit per 1,000 students however we talk a lot in broadband deployment about the last mile in education it's the last 30 feet because schools are dependent on Wi-Fi networks and Mary mentioned in stadiums how that's an example of a use case for very dense wireless schools are the exact same way it's not only very dense but it's also bandwidth usage is very spiky you'll have a class of 30 students who are all logging on to the wireless with their laptops at the exact same time and accessing some high-speed you know streaming media or downloading large files and that causes great spikes in bandwidth and puts a lot of demand on Wi-Fi networks as you mentioned great headache for network administrators Wi-Fi 6 is have provides a solution for exactly these kinds of dense wireless environments and what happens in education is that when the Wi-Fi doesn't work you end up with lost instructional time instructional time in education is gold and if you lose instructional time you end up with frustrated teachers you end up with frustrated students it's a mess and it's not what you want in order to leverage the power of technology and education you need to have seamless Wi-Fi connectivity and a few other things that people don't also think about is it's not just what we think of as laptops or tablets that are connecting to the internet you also have the internet of things devices that are connecting in schools whether we are talking about program robots Mary and I were talking before the session about a school where she had a technology director who was dealing with programming robots that the students were programming and the impact that that was having on the Wi-Fi and the students following the robots going down the halls with their laptops that is a very real use case in education you also have the impact of other IoT devices including school security and that's a really important consideration is that when you're talking about in today's school security environment you're talking about video cameras and other high-impact network devices that are using up a lot of bandwidth we don't ever want to be in a situation where we're sacrificing quality student education in order to keep our students safe and another one is also we just want to mention the potential impact for libraries we haven't talked a lot about the digital divide in this presentation but the digital divide is real there are good I'm glad we're going to talk about it there are many areas of this country where people don't have home internet access or reliable home internet access and libraries are often the key to providing that access for these users and whether you're talking about online learning or job training or libraries that have mobile labs that will travel to areas to service people who don't have home internet connectivity to help provide them with that access that they need to improve their job skills and training the possibilities are endless so I'm thrilled about the potential for Wi-Fi 6 and if I were still a technology director in the field I would be chomping at the bit to get this going that's great thanks and then finally Kristina Mason who is Vice President of Government Affairs for WISPA which is the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association yes absolutely so you know we're talking about the same thing we have a slightly different context so WISPA represents fixed wireless internet service providers who service a largely rural demographic up to about 4 million folks in rural America providing high speed up to gigabyte speed gigabit speed internet access through fixed wireless technology so I say different context because we're all talking about broadband we need more broadband access ours is more high powered outdoor use but it's the same highway if you will we're all on the same road and we need more lanes and that's what it kind of boils down to when we think about the opportunity for unlicensed spectrum that is really the highway over which our members are able to deploy internet to the folks who need it the most we're talking about under served un-served communities the rural digital divide bridging that our members can do that quickly, cheaply with fairly little overhead they're bootstrap companies they're small guys but what they do need is spectrum access and so right now our kind of workhorse is our favorite kind of ban is the 5 gigahertz but that's why we're excited for opportunities to expand those lanes allowing our members to really provide this connectivity that everyone is talking about now you know that's the hardest issue at least here in DC and of course abroad is that how are we going to bridge this divide in a way that is effective and is cost effective as well as technologically effective so our members in a position to do this but again it boils down to the spectrum access that allows us to move these high speeds across fairly large areas of rural America so we're excited for the opportunity we just need obviously a little bit more unlicensed spectrum space again our guys are smaller providers we wish we had the resources Comcast has and if we had perhaps this would be less of an issue for unlicensed but in order to compete and be able to provide low cost service to the people who need it most we need this unlicensed access with that said we do have existing incumbent use of a lot of these and so we are sympathetic and we actually are sensitive to the needs of protecting incumbents and making sure interference doesn't cause problems across the board but with that said I think through some of the technology we were discussing earlier kind of the AFC schematic where we can kind of on an automated basis kind of determine where folks are using we can kind of allow definitely low power indoor device I mean that's kind of for at least WSPA's point of view a given but at least even allow high power outdoor use so that we can get and kind of beam this internet right to the people who need it most well thanks so I have a few questions before we turn it back over to the audience what you can think about if you have any any of your own but one thing I'm hearing is or at least many people are I think I can explain why it's not such a disconnect but I'm hearing a disconnect between what Mary told us that Cisco projects that Wi-Fi traffic will just grow right along with cellular 5G the carrier 5G and yet you know when I go to Mobile World Congress where I speak at 5G conferences the hype I'm hearing is almost that Wi-Fi won't matter anymore that we're going to have network slicing and that's going to that's going to take care of all the schools the factories the office buildings because they're all going to have their own slice of the 5G network indoors and consumers can just have a single seamless connection indoors and outdoors which will be 5G because it will have basically unlimited like a gigabit per person everywhere you are so how do we think about that disconnect what's missing here so 5G is a wonderful technology and Cisco is very excited about 5G and thinks it has a wonderful future in any number of use cases so we're excited to see that beginning to take root here in the US and also overseas but here's when we think about the problem you raised Michael, we think about 5G as being predominantly an outdoor technology and Wi-Fi being predominantly an indoor technology now we'll still have Wi-Fi going to the wisps but here's why we are all carrying around devices that connect to a particular mobile carrier and there are multiple mobile carriers and so those when we connect via Wi-Fi we're connecting via what we in industry call a neutral host you don't have to be subscribed to a Wi-Fi carrier to get that Wi-Fi connectivity you do need broadband from David but you don't have to be subscribed to a Wi-Fi carrier so anywhere that device goes if there's a Wi-Fi network and it's open to the public or you have the passcode you can use it we cannot, I don't think if we play this out as a thought experiment decide that Wi-Fi is going to go away because if it goes away it means for any interior space you're going to have to have interior 5G connections for all 5G carriers and there are not a lot of building administrators who want to put that many indoor transmitters inside their buildings it's just not going to it's a construction problem but it's also a management problem and it's a very difficult thing to do but Wi-Fi continues to be predominantly indoor and continues to have life and vitality well into the 5G world now that's not to say the 5G folks aren't going to come indoors there are unlicensed technologies that the 5G community has promulgated and those will see implemented and we may see some shift from Wi-Fi to those unlicensed technologies but unlicensed in the indoor is clearly a winning in our formula and we don't see a change in that I agree we think the wire line network will still deliver especially indoors a better experience between the gigabit speeds and the capacity we offer I've not heard too many people talking about 5G speeds at a gigabit especially indoors especially multiple carriers so we're very confident that if you equate the Wi-Fi network it's connected to and that's the point of making sure Wi-Fi remains robust we're pretty confident that that network will deliver greater speed greater capacity greater control for the consumer and so I think we see a long range a longer term we're going to see that broadband network in the home really take advantage of the robust Wi-Fi that will be the consumer facing piece of it to match the network behind it I think we also from a rural broadband kind of perspective we have questions about the 5G propagation characteristics and the ability to do perhaps that last mile never mind last 30 feet connectivity given the necessary network infrastructure the high cost and the low density of people in these communities we just have some questions about the return on investment for these carriers to actually deploy into these communities we would be interested to see if they can make the case the economic case that it's worth their while to do that last mile last 30 foot investment that's where we believe the existing kind of broadband infrastructure comes into play including wireline and fixed wireless where we're there already we're doing this already it makes sense to our businesses there is already a return on investment very short I should say return on investment for deploying a fixed wireless network we don't have concerns about having this accessibility to these communities we're curious how these carriers will the cost given the low density of population in those areas one of the things I think about too is that this question of if you're a mobile carrier Verizon is a good example they announced over a year ago that rather than expand as sort of the platform for mobile 5G rather than expand their Fios footprint which is wireline it would be much less expensive to use really wide wireless channels in their case at 28 gigahertz millimeter wave spectrum to bring a gigabit of connectivity using fixed wireless they say they're going to do it to like another 32 million homes in urban and suburban all the top 100 markets and that's great except that if you need millimeter wave spectrum if you need a gig to the home because you don't have a wire then you don't that doesn't go through the walls you can't get into the home and I believe I'm almost sure it's true I should have checked because I didn't anticipate saying this is that Verizon is combining that new service with Wi-Fi in other words just like Comcast when the fixed wireless gets to the home then it's going through your Wi-Fi router in order to be distributed and the weakest link in that transmission potentially could be the Wi-Fi if you can get a gigabit to the home whether it's wire line or using millimeter wave technology that other carriers are using that's fine but in the home if you can't deliver those gigabit speeds that's where the consumer is not experiencing the capabilities of your network which is why it's important we get Wi-Fi capabilities to match the capabilities of those transmission networks I'm just going to jump on her concerns about rural areas I was over Memorial Day weekend I spent the weekend just outside of Shepherdstown, West Virginia had a lovely weekend and we were staying at a bed and breakfast that was 10 minutes outside of town now Shepherdstown is a university town 10 minutes outside of town no cell connection and the bed and breakfast relied on satellite so I just I'll be honest I just talk about the amazing potential of 5G but all I can say is how's that going to help our rural areas that don't even have 4G don't even have 3G right now in some cases how's that going to help close the digital divide I think it's just going to exacerbate it so while I think there's tremendous potential in 5G technologies I think it's also important that we keep in mind that just because the nature of the technology those in rural areas it's going to be much more difficult for them to access those benefits so when I jump jump ahead because I was going to ask later Christina so you know you mentioned currently WISPs some use some license spectrum but predominantly it's unlicensed and they use 5Ghz so why isn't that sufficient I mean why why is having access to these wider these much wider channels at 5.9 and especially across 6Ghz outdoors what difference would that make if anyone in this room has sat on 4.95 during rush hour you understand the need for more lanes and more ability to move through these tight bandwidth so 5Ghz is our workhorse I think around 30 years ago you call them junk bands we call them treasure bands our little pockets of treasure but these opportunities for unlicensed spectrum are kind of our go-to spectrum bands 5Ghz being probably the most widely used one but the problem is the more times you have the more traffic you have over this the more proud it is it's very simple in the physics of it all but it's somewhat complicated when you start thinking about expanding to other bands so right now 5.9 and 6Ghz are very attractive because with little tweaking of equipment we can start using that wider spectrum bandwidth allowing us to kind of deliver higher speed internet because again we need the bandwidth to deliver those higher speeds and in that way we are able to really make sure that this world connectivity is at higher speeds so that's the essential so I said at the beginning kind of moving to a different use case I said at the very beginning that although we'd all love to have obviously much faster throughput so our CAD videos are 8K but the internet of things is the real game changer for the 5G ecosystem and one of the things I was very pleased to learn from Amazon is that I really want to visit and when I told the commissioners they said they want to go visit is that the Amazon they have these massive fulfillment centers as each one is as big as a couple of football fields and apparently if you stand up in the observation platform you see thousands I mean what do we have I think over 100,000 robots these robots that are moving around really quickly you know just going to the you know to the shelves and getting things moving it over boxing and then their employees are walking around too and you apparently you cringe because you think oh my god the robots are going to hit these people but they will stop and they're all moving around really fast not using DSRC right that's right it would be like the dream for our auto system if only DSRC worked but no but this is actually happening and it's all Wi-Fi you know Amazon of course being a sophisticated company it's been able to kind of do their own they said they made a kind of a slightly proprietary version of Wi-Fi in order to track track and coordinate all of these robots and their employees can't step on to the floor without a Bluetooth badge which is also unlicensed of course because the robots see Bluetooth they don't I don't know if they care if it's a person or not they just avoid anything that's wearing a badge so this is like really cool but just that they're relying on Wi-Fi for a high reliability operation so I guess I'll ask Mary to start with we always hear about the big thing about unlicensed spectrum is of course it's best efforts you have to accept any interference there's no guarantees so to what degree will other businesses be able to rely on Wi-Fi 6 for more important operations and why is it different than what we have today so the Amazon example is pretty interesting because there they've been able to make do with 5 GHz spectrum which as Michael says it's a radio commons under the legal scheme any of us could walk into the floor of those warehouses if we were allowed to with our smartphones talking away in a 5 GHz band now what Amazon does is a couple things when they limit access because they're an enterprise they're not going to let me walk out there with my smartphone they limit access to only their employees and they limit access to those of us those other transmitters so they essentially have cleared the spectrum inside that warehouse to be able to use Wi-Fi 5 to move all these robots around what will happen with Wi-Fi 6 is that becomes much less of a problem because now with Wi-Fi 6 the spectrum becomes more deterministic so instead of Wi-Fi broadcasting around the warehouse sending out signals to the robots and every single robot here's what every other robot is being told to do now we're going to have Wi-Fi devices, client devices in those robots are other kinds of client devices and that signal is going to go right to them only to them and there'll be simultaneous signals like that working in the warehouse that means you can have a better quality of signal it's going to go further than the Wi-Fi 5 signal and it's going to be able to perform much better in these internet of things industrial automation kind of environment so it's a big game changer in Wi-Fi this is truly a revolutionary shift from 5 to 6 you know everyone thinks that for many years licensed spectrum was better but what you see is by decentralizing control and allowing this unlicensed environment you get a lot more innovation anyone whether it's an Amazon or a Comcast or a WISPA member can figure out or a library they can figure out how to use it but those bounds are much broader the protections are less and those bounds are broader so you can really do the innovation and you don't need the FCC to mandate the protection Amazon's able to control the environment and then innovate on that environment and so over the years I think and this is why you see two commissioners who really in a bipartisan effort see the value of unlicensed spectrum the thinking has evolved where you don't need the FCC setting aside particular technology or standard and and mandating that here in Washington but rather dispersing the control to the user and the user then gets to use it and innovate on it and it's really now it's obviously the dominant technology used to access the internet and now it seems like it's going to be a very dominant technology and innovation in the IoT space as well and I think maybe a very unique context that we see it in the fixed wireless space for IoT applications is farms where you have actual like tractors, irrigation systems all of these IoT contexts that a generation go weren't even contemplated but now are made possible through this particularly through our fixed wireless accessibility but through the spectrum access that we're talking about right now on a unlicensed basis so it's amazing how far we've come in a single generation but it's interesting to think this is just the beginning with the Wi-Fi 6 what else can happen and what other applications that will allow your small local farmer to make sure that he in a drought can make sure his crops are water without having to manually go out there and arrange all of his systems so it's just really interesting how these IoT systems are evolving Let me ask at least one more question here and then we'll open up and that is I just want to get to this because it's a very important point on 6 gigahertz what we were talking about a bit with the commissioners about the fact that there's four different band segments and that at least from our point of view unfortunately the FCC's proposal isn't as simple as making all 1200 megahertz available for the sort of inexpensive plug-and-play wireless routers that most homes and small businesses use today so there's actually four band segments and the two largest ones would require they could operate at standard Wi-Fi power but would require it would be limited because it would only be where it was safe for these fixed lengths and it would be controlled by an automated frequency system database so I guess what I'm and oh and if that happens there would only be one not seven but just one additional 160 megahertz channel in six there could be another one if we get 5.9 cleared up but as far as 6 gigahertz goes I guess I'd ask Susan from the school perspective David from the home perspective I mean what are we losing if we can't get sort of you know kind of easy off the shelf Wi-Fi routers that are kind of an upgraded version of the way we use Wi-Fi today sure I think Commissioner Rose and Warsaw said it right on the one here we have to find more creative ways to use Spectra but I will say the more complicated we make it to use it the less expensive it becomes and the less user friendly it becomes and then it won't get used and five years later we'll be saying why is this underutilized again and we're going to have to figure out a way to make it more utilized so it's a challenge here in Washington because we are trying to identify underutilized spectrum or unutilized spectrum and use it more intensively it's important as part of our national policy but at the same time the more complicated the more expensive the less likely the more complex it is and we're talking about the enterprise level there's probably more flexibility there to use it but if you're talking about consumers getting access to the greater speeds in these 160 megahertz channels we're going to need to make the rules as less restrictive and less costly as possible yeah I would just share your concern in education space with regards to the complexity and the cost I think it's a tricky balance to strike but I think your rights and that is a concern I share your concern as well yeah because you could have a very large high school that could have enterprise grade networks but for the small the small rural district with students K-12 and the teacher who's also the technology director and does all the desktop support they're not going to be able to leverage they're not going to be the ones doing that kind of innovation that you were describing right and you know WSPA does so for high powered outdoor devices we think there is an appropriate context for automated frequency coordination we think it's actually necessary to prevent interference on that large scale outdoor high powered use particularly for point to point and point to multi-point technology it's fairly easy and fairly cheap to use this simple database AFC schematic in order to kind of make sure there are interference issues but on the indoor low power we openly support and we set those at FCC that that can be made available without an AFC or database kind of scenario and that you know can be done pretty easily without concerns for interference so we understand the context of that kind of automated frequency coordination on the high powered outdoor space and we're supportive of that but when it comes to indoor low power devices we think there's that's a totally different context right that's a good distinction anything on this or can we let's just let's keep moving okay well let's see if there's yeah yeah and then we've definitely because we're approaching the end of our time here so yes in the back but you know introduce yourself I know who you are but public knowledge so I have an obvious question you've heard Republicans and Democrats urban and rural wire line and wireless all saying this is wonderful it's got to happen why isn't this going to happen who the hell is holding it up where is the opposition I haven't heard one but he said one person say we should not do this what's the problem with doing it when there's such unanimity who's holding it up obviously the incumbent holders are going to be resistant and be very concerned about the parameters of how it gets defined but who and and we can say you can say who those are I mean it's useful to know but that doesn't seem strong enough to be holding up anything where there's such unanimity what's going on okay well I can start with that one so we talked about in the band today there are a lot of fixed uses there's also some mobile uses of the band by broadcasters and others but there are a lot of links there's well over 100,000 links in the FCC's database so there's a lot of incumbents not a few incumbents and the United States is probably unique in that when we look around the globe there are fewer incumbencies in Europe there are some countries in the world where there are zero incumbents so it's our cross to bear many of those connections are now used in critical infrastructure and to keep critical infrastructures running and being responsive so particularly in the electric utility industry those communications links help the utilities keep their networks operable and stay within state public utility commission and FERC guidelines for operability so I think in answer to Al's question the FCC wants to proceed very carefully here to make sure that if they allow unlicensed in I believe it's when they will allow unlicensed in they're doing so under a set of conditions that everyone including the electric utility industry can feel somewhat confident that unlicensed transmitters are not going to impinge upon the ability of those utility uses to keep their electric utilities running and there are similar concerns on the telecom side there are similar concerns on the public safety side all of these are important constituencies in the band I call out the utility one because they're subject to a whole separate regulatory regime through their states and through FERC so I think all we're seeing now is that deliberation process happening at the engineering level but how you raise a good point which is we for many years for 75 years the FCC allocated spectrum to these whether it's a utility or the auto industry or microwave links in a certain way and it was based on the view that a lot of the spectrum didn't seem valuable for other applications at the time and they of course are societally important applications like an electric utility but we don't really do that anymore so as we start seeing more spectrum pressure to use it more intensively whether it's for IOT or Amazon or broadband we have to start looking at these initial allocations and see what can we do better what can we do without disrupting and disrupting these existing services how intensively are they still using it and really are there newer technologies they can use that are better we would give a utility maybe a channel that at the time had no market value and that they use very unintensively that today we might say it could be much more intensively utilized for unlicensed spectrum is there a way for them to share with unlicensed can they use a commercial 5G network or an unlicensed network under the same rules as everybody else and these are what Commissioner Rosenworstow and O'Reilly were talking about we have to evaluate the nature of the incumbency they do have certain rights but we cannot be beholden to decisions that were made 75 years ago 50 years ago in a very different environment in a very different policy and that's the struggle and why it doesn't move as quickly as it probably should sir yeah up here hold on for the microphone Lieutenant Colonel Lewis again the question is has to do with quality of service you mentioned that in the Amazon case that you could probably do more unicasting instead of the broadcasting and then maybe over in the in the rural cases or even in the schools is there going to be a need to do less quality of service or would you still want to do quality of service as congestion and probably kind of creep that so the deterministic nature of Wi-Fi 6 is intended both to ensure that that link to the client device is a higher quality of service but it also enables spectrum reuse it gets everybody off the air more quickly and it allows the spectrum to be used more intensively one other aspect though of Wi-Fi 6 is that we've gone back to the 2.4 band that original junk band which pretty much had been abandoned not abandoned but highly congested it was not a place where enterprises wanted to put a lot of their traffic maybe not a place where Comcast would want to put a lot of traffic because every time you light up your 2.4 on your Wi-Fi you see 80 or 100 networks but we're going to be able to repurpose that with Wi-Fi 6 for Internet of Things now not for low latency but a lot of sensor technology and other Internet of Things can still run on 2.4 with the Wi-Fi 6 technology that's being introduced and then one last one because we're over time you could make it a quick response and we'll adjourn absolutely, I'm Albert Maxwell and some graduate and PhD students and I currently I worked with Waymo for the past two years and now with Toyota Research Institute and their autonomous vehicle department I was curious if any of you could speak on how 5G is actually going to connect the overall different socio-economic communities I'll say just within the United States or do you foresee this sort of level of innovation on this scale to inevitably leave some groups behind, shall I say? Anybody? So I share we're biased I mean I don't think there's any intentional leaving communities behind I do believe in the altruistic sensibilities of the carriers and making sure that they're going to deploy Internet everybody's going to have 5G connectivity and the world's going to be changed when we talk about the practicalities of those promises we're at least in the fixed wireless kind of industry we know how this stuff works in determining the last mile connectivity in the infrastructure needs that surround that and we just aren't 100% sold on the promise of 5G connectivity particularly for that last mile in the world context I don't know if anybody has any other thoughts on urban context but at least within the world communities we have some concerns about the overselling of this commitment to deploy within I think something like 3 years we have concerns so in the meantime we're deploying we're there and you know given the conversation we just had in the space in the spectrum and the hopeful on this issue we're hoping that we'll be able to fill that last mile gap along with existing wire line infrastructure etc I'm just I think our industry is not entirely convinced that 5G is the panacea that the world was looking for I would just add also as someone who's very attuned to the digital divide because when you work with schools you work with all schools and that covers the entire breadth and depth and diversity of our country is in rural areas there are a lot of times people don't have access because it's not available or because it's too expensive but that brings on another cost price and that there are a lot of communities where people just can't afford to have internet access and we can go down a whole other rabbit hole aspect of the digital divide but unless the carriers are going to be offering 5G connectivity for free to anybody who wants it that digital divide is still going to exist and that's something that we have to come to terms with as a nation and I would just add you put your finger on a very important policy debate that has been taken up in Washington and you see it playing out in the sprint T-Mobile merger and it means that T-Mobile is trying to make there you see it in AT&T FirstNet trying to cover the country for public safety so I'll just leave you with one fact by 2023 Cisco is projecting globally 3.4% of mobile connections will be 5G 3.4% so a lot of hype around 5G but I think we need to keep in mind that it's going to take a while for that ecosystem to ramp up by 2023 the 4G ecosystem globally is still growing still going strong it is the dominant ecosystem so it's going to take a while but these are important questions to be talking about thank you and to kind of going all the way back to the beginning it's like a simple thing like whether it's whether it's mobile 5G mobile 5G you don't have it unless the backhaul unless there's unless there's fiber probably if not to that building certainly very close by and as long as fibers obviously getting out there through a whole variety of other providers like cable companies telcos, wisps and so on high speed connectivity that is and anyone who has access to that it's going to be maybe less in rural areas but to the extent you have it then you won't have any bottleneck to the distribution of that to all your devices indoors as long as you have plenty of spectrum for wifi with that thank you all for those of you who hung on to the end thank our panelists and we'll see you at our next event