 get going here. So welcome, welcome to New America. I am Michael Calibri's director of the wireless feature project, which is part of the Open Technology Institute here at New America, as many of you know. Is it too echoey or loud? It's okay. All right. So this is closing the high-speed broadband gap shared spectrum as a fiber extension. And as we, is that sound okay? It seems like it's echoing to me, but it's all right. As you know, as we said in the event invitation, more than 23 million Americans living in rural areas, that's 40 million Americans of households and 34 million Americans overall lack adequate internet access, as is defined by the FCC, you know, 25 down and three up. And more than 80 percent of U.S. households and businesses have only one option for high-speed broadband, a lack of competition that keeps prices high and internet speeds lower than they should be. So today we have a very diverse panel of a fixed wireless equipment maker, a rural wireless internet service provider, a big company that's been involved in fiber deployment, Google, of course, the American Library Association and the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance, personified by these folks all together. And what most of them not all have in common is supporting a petition that was filed to open a band I'll talk about in a minute for the purpose of what you might call or what we've called wireless fiber, fiber as a substitute or an extension. Wireless is a substitute or extension for fiber where it's too expensive to trench all the way to the home, school, library, office or what have you. We had an event last December called Wireless Fiber that focused mainly on high-frequency millimeter wave bands with companies including Verizon, Starry, Siklu and others are using these very high frequencies for high-speed connections. But that has a lot of limitations in terms of propagation. And so this event is asking why not use underutilized midband spectrum which has far better propagation, you know, but the question is is there any because all the spectrum seems to be assigned. So, you know, our view is that finding a band where you can get high capacity fixed wireless at costs that are far more affordable than trenching fiber would be a huge win for closing not only the rural broadband gap but I think as you'll hear it'll be a solution in exurban areas, suburban areas where homes are far apart and even Andy Clegg tells me right here in suburban Virginia he can't get a high capacity broadband in his apartment building. So it can be a solution for, you know, shooting that connectivity almost anywhere needed. Fixed wireless networks can be deployed at 20 or 25 percent or less of the capital costs of an all fiber network while offering comparable speeds certainly more than folks would typically use for today's applications. So just one last thing I'll do before turning it over to the panel for opening remarks is just give you a kind of a high level summary of the petition that was filed in late June at the FCC by, you know, on the panel there it was, you know, led in considerable part by Mimosa Networks and by WISPA, Rise Broadband signed on, their WISPA member, the Open Technology Institute was also a co-chair of the coalition but there were 20 companies and groups that also included the American Library Association, the school's health library broadband coalition consumer federation of America, Cincinnati Bell, a number of other equipment providers. And essentially what we're asking is for the commission to make available for shared use 500 megahertz of spectrum from 3700 to 4200 megahertz. So this is, we've heard, in fact, I was up late last night by leaving comments on the 3.5 gigahertz band, the citizen's broadband radio service which is now being, which the commission adopted final rules last year, now being possibly reopened, the rules being reopened at the request of CTIA and T-Mobile and so we're arguing about that. But immediately above that band is the downlink portion of the fixed satellite service. So this is the fixed satellite, in that band are earth stations like 2,000 to 3,000 I believe, roughly, 7,000. Okay, I registered. We're not sure if they're all in use, which I'm sure they'll touch on. But basically this has been used for video distribution primarily, cable head ends for example, use this and these are fixed sites. But compared to the capacity of that spectrum, it's very underutilized. It also is similar but actually to the 3.5 band in the sense that it could be shared but as you'll hear more easily because unlike Navy ships, in 3.5 you have to protect naval radar, ships coming and going. Here these satellite dishes sitting out in a field are not coming and going. We know exactly where they are and where they're pointed at what satellite transponder and what spectrum they're using. So under our proposal, the band would be made available for licensed point, multi point fixed wireless broadband deployment while protecting fixed satellite service and also there's a handful of fixed service, point to point links, but only about 100 partly because of the way the satellites are reserving virtually the entire 500 megahertz where they're located when in fact they're only using a small portion of that. I think you'll hear more about that but the example we've used at the FCC is the Associated Press for example has something like 900 to 1,000 of the C-band receive only Earth stations and just by tradition they use what's called full band, full arc reservation of the entire 500 megahertz from horizon to horizon. In reality every one of the Earth stations is pointed at the same satellite to a single transponder that accesses only 23 megahertz of spectrum. That leaves 477 unused spectrum that could be coordinated potentially for other uses. The band would be open access so this would not be auctions it would basically be registration based licensing as we have in for fixed service point to a point with under part 101 which may mean something to a number of you. I see some current former FCC and NTIA folks who will know about that for sure. What we suggest is that an operator such as a West like Jeff and Rhys broadband could use up to 160 megahertz in a local area that would allow up to three providers to have gigabit fast service potentially in a single area if there's no Earth station and depending on what the Earth station is actually using it could be less than that. There's more details and we won't bore you with all of it today because the bigger question is really is there a public policy case for pushing to share these grossly underutilized bands for something such as fixed wireless, wireless fiber because typically what we're always hearing about is mobile, mobile, mobile needs more and more and although that's always certainly useful we have a broadband gap in this country that we need to address. So with that, I think we're going to give you details on intros because that will just eat up the time. There's a bio handout for everyone but each of the panelists will speak for just a few minutes sort of to give their high level points to inform the discussion we'll have after that and then toward the end I'm definitely going to open it up so be thinking about what you want to ask or comment on you know if you think this is totally crazy feel free to tell us but please do identify yourselves so that we can kind of know where you're coming from too. So with that we'll start with Brian Hinman who is the CEO and co-founder of Mimosa Networks based in San Jose, California. Please to be here, I promise to keep my open comments brief so we can have a lot more interactive discussion but Mimosa Networks has been in business for five years now. We started with a very simple proposition which was that over time I think we're going to see all of our access networks around the world not just here in the United States but around the world migrating to an architecture that we call a hybrid fiber wireless architecture. Now I was in the copper business for many years providing DSL products for many of the large telcos around the world and during the first phase of what we would call broadband penetration around the world we saw copper based networks being the way that we accessed the internet because we had these either twisted pair or coaxed our homes and that became the way that we built our broadband networks but what we've seen over the last few years is the copper simply not keeping up with the rate at which we are adopting the internet and the applications growing in their bandwidth demands and latency requirements etc. So our view was that while ideally the whole world would get fiber we'd all get fiber to our homes that's not going to be economically viable at this point to do that. So what we're going to see worldwide is a push toward having the fiber go out as far as it's economically viable but where the amount of revenue at the end of that fiber becomes not supporting the fiber deployment cost you switch over to wireless for the last leg of the journey. Arguably today we already have a hybrid fiber wireless networks because the vast majority of how we access the internet indoors is via Wi-Fi so really the way to think about a HFW network is just extending that wireless infrastructure one level or maybe two levels beyond where the building ends that's really what we're about and our job is as Mimosa is building that great equipment to provide very high capacity networks very reliable but doing it at an affordable price. So the reason that we wanted to lead the charge here on this 3.7 to 4.2 is that frankly we don't have enough spectrum that is protected spectrum in the United States or any place in the world for building point to multi-point networks under part 101 we've got a great framework for doing point to point it's a pay-as-you-go system for most of the bands some of its auction but most of the good spectrum you can go pull a license even a small operator can make this happen and you get yourself a very high capacity link on a point-to-point basis but what we don't have today is available protected spectrum to build point to multi-point networks. So the predominance of the fixed wireless that you see around the world today both United States as well as internationally is built in the five gigahertz band and I think it's served as well in the last 15 years it's all over the place and many parts of the world in Cali for example Latin America it is it's the main way that people get to the internet and in rural areas in the United States it works it works okay and I'm sure Jeff's going to talk a lot more about that but even in rural areas I think there's a increasing need to get protected spectrum so people can have that certainty and equality of the service that they provide and that's why this this petition is so important for us that if this goes the route that so much auction spectrum would go that what we're going to see is that the price of this stuff is going to go up so high it's going to exclude even the largest of the fixed wireless providers like rise broadband and it would be anti-competitive really so this is a critical time I think both in the United States as well as worldwide where we actually have an opportunity to create competition for local broadband access where today we have arguably three or four providers over our mobile service 75% of Americans only have one choice as far as who they get the broadband from and that's one of the things I think we can change here if we make this spectrum available more broadly okay next up is Jeff Kohler who is co-founder of of rise broadband which is I believe the largest rural Wisp Michael is correct I'm the co-founder of a company called rise broadband we're headquartered in the Denver area we actually provide service in rural areas across 16 states right now we've been in business for 11 years right now and we're sort of a conglomeration of a lot of these small wireless internet service providers that exist I think it's a it's one of the largest industries a lot of people have never heard about fixed wireless service providers it's estimated there's somewhere between 2,025 hundred of these small companies in the United States right now providing service in areas where people typically do not have cable or they don't have anything better than an old copper plant or a satellite service to choose from and so my company is acquired 114 of these companies which is how we got the 16 states so quickly and we do a lot of tower building ourselves to reach these people that otherwise don't have a choice and you know so we operate in a variety of spectrum bands right now and we are feeling the squeeze so we I'd say 70% of rural service providers are utilizing a 5 gigahertz frequency for their service it's good for capacity it's good for speed but there's a lot of people using 5 gigahertz right now and the propagation characteristics are not optimal for getting through obstructions and trees and things like that we also use the 365 band 365 to 37 and we have an experimental license and 3.5 we find the propagation characteristics much more favorable in that band it's also an LTE grade spectrum band so we're able to deploy advanced equipment that we could not deploy in 5 gigahertz for example because we get to leverage what the rest of the world is doing with LTE and the R&D and the progress being made there so we look at the 3.7 to 4.2 band for example that's just a simple extension of what we're already doing in 365 to 37 getting the equipment built for that band would not be difficult for us and it does give us the propagation characteristics that we like to provide very high connect rates to homes and businesses that oftentimes would not be able to even get it a wireless service and a 5 gigahertz band the other two bands that are used by wireless ISPs a bit are 900 megahertz great for getting through trees but very congested we can't get great speeds and 900 megahertz 2.4 is another band we use also very crowded right now so 902.4 is used very little we rely a lot on 5 gigahertz 365 seems to be a real sweet spot mid band for providing the best service and the best speeds that we can make available to people that otherwise don't have the choice that don't have a choice at all or certainly don't have a choice of providers so there is an ecosystem out there to solve the digital divide it exists today there's a couple of thousand service providers doing this their satellite companies doing this with improved levels of service we have an equipment ecosystem and we're currently providing you know up to 100 megabit service to a home that previous to us coming there or another company like us didn't have a choice so it's a really big deal for them and this band in 3.7 to 4.2 I think would be a very powerful tool in our chest and that the comments we we filed last night on the 3.5 citizen broadband service we talked about rise broadband and what great use they're making of 3650 which if you didn't pick up on that is just immediately below the band this band we're petitioning on this 33.7 to 4.2 but 3650 you know it's 50 megahertz but that's why the equipment is going to be available you know right now for the band just above next up Andy Clegg who is the spectrum engineering lead for Google great thanks Michael and thanks everybody for coming Google is a small internet company based out of California we're into a variety of things but you know relevant here we provide wired fiber service through Google fiber we are also a spectrum access system administrator for at least conditionally approved administration for the 3.5 gigahertz band for providing citizen broadband radio service so we're involved in various wired and wireless activities that provide internet access to the masses we also have internet access through webpass a millimeter wave type of high throughput broadband so very quickly obviously connecting more people in the internet to broadband and providing wireless service as an adjunct to wired broadband services is also a good thing because it gives you more connectivity options you know Jeff mentioned about how this is important in rural domain getting people connected in traditionally underserved areas but you know Mike Michael alluded to it to it earlier you know I'm sort of a case study in why it's actually important even in urban environments I live in a building that was built in the 80s and when it was built it was wired for cable and the building owners now do not want to rewire the building for fiber they don't want to add fiber to the building I think it's too disrupt it's a very large building they don't want to go through the disruption of adding fiber to our building so we do not even though Verizon Fios which is a fiber service goes right past our building and serves other buildings nearby we can't get it because they don't want to install the fiber into our building having the ability to provide wireless last mile last hundred meter whatever service to your building even in an urban environment could be a great adjunct to the wireless infrastructure the wired infrastructure we think on the wireless side having a toolset that allows you to use a variety of wireless access methods is good we think you know there's room for exclusive licensed spectrum which is what the traditional mobile spectrum is we think obviously unlicensed spectrum is fantastic Wi-Fi connectivity in 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and unlicensed use in other bands we think that lightly licensed like is being employed in CVRS is also a nice viable option for providing wireless services and then of course all of these are sort of mixed in with the concept of sharing spectrum because as Michael said at least below 95 gigahertz there's no spectrum that is no longer spoken for by somebody and so instead of playing a shell game of relocating people there's a need to find ways to share existing spectrum identify spectrum that could be used more intensively and find ways to share it through spectrum access systems or other types of technologies that are being developed so that brings us to the topic you know at hand today the 3.7 to 4.2 gigahertz band which we believe is substantially underutilized by the satellite industry we believe that a combination well mostly because of the way the band is licensed it could actually be used more intensively than it would appear at first look and we are doing studies to understand how more intensively the band could be used for a variety of applications including point-to-multipoint which is one of the things that the broadband access coalition filed in its petition we think that point-to-multipoint could be deployed in the band very rapidly even given the existing fixed satellite service earth stations that exist in the band and that the band could also be used for other things one of the things to remember here is it's 500 megahertz worth of spectrum in 3.7 to 4.2 and to put that into perspective that's more bandwidth than the cellular band the PCS band AWS 1 AWS 2 AWS 3 the 600 megahertz band and both 700 megahertz bands combined in one band that one C band 3.7 to 4.2 allocation is more than all of those other existing mobile broadband bands combined so we think there's room in this band to do a variety of applications point-to-multipoint can be done pretty expeditiously the main point is that given the demand for broadband access we don't think you can let 500 megahertz of prime midband spectrum remain underutilized and of course the FCC realizes that as well they've got a notice of inquiry coming out on August 3rd to address the potential use of 3.7 to 4.2 for more applications than just the fixed satellite service so all right thanks Andy and next we have Ellen Satterwhite who is a policy fellow for the American Library Association which as I mentioned is one of the petitioners part of the broadband access coalition and Ellen is also vice president of the glinoco group our friends very close by we saw our old office 20th and L with that with that statement Michael so I thought I might get up here and play but we do belong so the America has 120,000 libraries public academic law libraries the even school libraries so and what unites them all is that broadband is mission critical now what used to be nice to have is now so integrated into how libraries serve their communities and also what people are coming to expect from libraries that that's why the American Library Association is so involved and that's why we were pleased to sign on to the petition that Michael was talking about so a little bit more about libraries and broadband over 60% of public libraries report that they are the only access free access to computers and broadband access in their communities approximately 77 million Americans use public library Internet in a year so if you break that down that's one in five Americans over the age of 16 has specifically gone to a library to use the Internet or library or excuse me or computers in the last year so the FCC has recognized that broadband access is and and many policymakers and people in this room I'm sure know that broadband access is critical to libraries and the missions they perform in communities so the FCC established some broadband goals for libraries they that are 100 megabits per second for smaller libraries and gigabit per second for larger libraries unfortunately 40% of libraries subscribe to speeds of 10 megabits per second or less so think about what you subscribe to at home unless you're Andy you have 10 at least on a good day okay we won't we won't call out he's not on Twitter he says because he doesn't have good enough broadband at home but I have at least 10 megabits per second at home and 40% of libraries cannot either for price reasons or for availability reasons cannot subscribe in fact a third of urban libraries report that they don't have faster speeds available to them and that's even higher for rural libraries 41% report the same so just a couple of statistics in these because these prices and these availability is very so widely in states we have trouble collecting data even for our own purposes so a specific example in Idaho a rural library member of ours in Idaho reports paying over a thousand dollars per month for five megabits per second in Boise a suburban library pays $750 for 40 megabits per second we as the American Library Association are interested in better broadband to all of our libraries we're interested in anything that helps us do that so we've been very supportive of talking about unlicensed and more spectrum for unlicensed sharing more fiber you name it if you want us to talk about broadband access we will come and we would love to be part of it because it's essential it's critical for libraries it's critical for our community so I have more statistics and even more stories if you'd like to hear me tell stories about libraries thank you Ellen I never tired hearing about libraries especially now that they're community technology centers and our final panelist Calpat Gouda who is president of the dynamic spectrum alliance a global organization thank you I think Ellen stole my line about which one of these things is not like the other because I think it's us I'm not going to get into the controversial issue of whether libraries need high-speed internet or not highly controversial I'm sure I am going to get into the easier issue of spectrum sharing everybody loves sharing sharing is caring no in reality you know my background comes from the satellite industry so I spent many many years in the industry and in fact frankly through most of the the 2000s spent time trying to defend satellite interests in the sea band in this portion three seven to four two well I understand from that perspective from the satellite perspective what they face the kinds of services they provide really valuable services but I also understand the challenges that they face and trying to maintain that access to that spectrum it is growing more and more difficult for them it was frankly the battle can say started against the we'll call it the IMT crowd using ITU parlance really LTE today that challenge continues and grows the reality has been said the spectrum is used by satellites but the way satellites use that spectrum in particular is leaves it highly underutilized and particularly in different parts of the world I think that's also an important implication the sea band is used in the United States but as has been noted the number of downlink sites number of dishes that are deployed are relatively few given the geography that we're talking about in Europe 3 4 to 3 8 for example has largely been taken away from satellites and given to terrestrial mobile on the other hand if you look in Latin America and Africa the use of that band is significantly different significantly more intense so as we've talked about satellite sorry as we've talked about saddle or spectrum usage and utilization always important to understand how important harmonization difficulties of harmonizing spectrum grow increasingly more complex as we've gotten to a place where spectrum is so important and the easy spectrum or for harmonizing easy spectrum for spectrum clearing is really gone and so that's the choice that we have in front of us oftentimes right now is how do we make more spectrum available for broadband services and the obvious choice that regulators have tended to favor historically is let us try to figure out ways to clear that band so we can auction that's been the storyline going going over the last 20 years that is really not the storyline that can continue in the future we have to figure out ways to share spectrum because the incumbents that are in the band are genuinely providing valuable so as we look at this petition today it is not that the satellite folks are not providing valuable services it is only that the spectrum they are utilizing can be utilized more intensively through sharing options I think that's what the petition that has been filed tries to do I will say that the DSA has not signed on to that petition for a variety of reasons but we are very supportive of many elements of that in particular we're very supportive of the idea of better understanding the actual utilization in the band as been noted earlier part of this is satellite the licensing scheme that is undertaken gives them full band full access full arc rights to that spectrum despite the actual utilization of the band is being much less than that that really does need to be identified and fixed to enable to enable more intensive we think longer term that a dynamic approach to spectrum spectrum access is a much better approach we think that drives more utilization we think the technology frankly is there now big CBRS has been touched on earlier CBRS that methodology and that strategy is frankly in many ways ideal to enable the broadest and more most intensive use of spectrums going forward finally one last point I will make I really think I've talked about sharing is being important to the satellite industry and I'll tell you why in two ways one for the spectrum in which they are incumbents as I've noted the challenges are growing greater and greater their ability particularly in C-band both the downlink and the uplink in six gigahertz is growing more challenge their ability to retain that access to the spectrum I think is it's just that really frankly a matter of time the advocacy for status quo I think most of the satellite industry themselves will accept that this is a this is a battle to delay the inevitable so so retaining access to incumbent spectrum I think sharing enables them to do so and sharing by the way from a dynamic approach starts with protection of the incumbent but not grandfathering it's protection of the incumbent and enabling future deployments going forward they are the incumbent operator and they should be treated that way access to additional spectrum is also critical to the satellite industry but nobody is going to be giving them spectrum in the 500 to a thousand to 1500 megahertz blocks as has historically been given so if the industry wants to grow they need to themselves figure out how they make it attractive for government regulators to give them access to that spectrum doing so in the old model is highly highly unlikely to happen a sharing scenario particularly a dynamic approach is a way that they can get access to the spectrum I will say that the other side is also important on the terrestrial mobile side they have been very happy trying to pursue the strategy of exclusive access to spectrum I think for reasons that I've mentioned that's also growing challenge the last WRC was the first time they were told no in many bands by the world I think the there's a sea change going on on that front as well it is not easy to clear spectrum we can go through the spectrum battle for years and years and make very little progress so my last point is I think sharing is the way of the future it benefits both sides of the equation I should say all sides of the equation that's the way we move forward and get spectrum in the hands of those who can actually utilize it make more intensive use of it and ultimately bring those services that customers and the public at large are our demand thank all right thanks Cal back and I suppose it's really useful to think about because probably goes without saying the least for the moment the satellite folks are not exactly thrilled by this idea and you know but it's we've been using the throwing the term around around here in New America NIMBY right not in my backyard that's been the mantra among incumbents concerning spectrum sharing spectrum reallocation but if the military can learn to love sharing I think even the satellite industry can better than losing it so I'll go to some I have some questions to ask and then I hope you all will can continue thinking about what you want to you want to to ask but I like to kind of clarify and come back around to a few the points that were raised but maybe went by too quickly so one it's very basic and I'll start Jeff to start us off and then of course on any of these anybody can chime in why is you know we're always hearing when we talk about wireless what jumps mine always is mobile I guess what I would more correctly call mobile like you have on your smartphone you're using whether it's a carrier or Wi-Fi and some people you know I just got help them are are using 4g mobile even for their home broadband perhaps if they have to but why is so fixed wireless is different why is it a good solution for rural in particular and is it always because is it limited the places where it's just not possible for cable or fiber to go there or is it also a value proposition you know in terms of the relative cost of getting wires to these places hopefully this mic is on it is I can hear it the most obvious thing with fixed wireless and the advantage of it is the cost of deployment so compared to let's take fiber for example I'd say deploying a fixed wireless network probably costs maybe up to a tenth of the price of what you pay to install a fiber network certainly in the rural areas a lot of that those metrics hold true on the cable side or any wire line side so all in for example we operate on 3300 towers right now primarily in rural America and a tower for us by the way it could it could look like a commercial tower it could look like a grain elevator it can look like a rooftop silos water towers you know those types of things but all in you know our network costs is about $250 per subscriber and as compared to a fiber which is probably thousand best case two three thousand maybe higher in rural areas so as far as reaching 23 million additional people out there that don't have access to broadband right now of course you want to take a less expensive route to doing it and building out fiber or even cable to an extent is a little bit like bringing a gun to a knife fight it's not needed and it can be done much more efficiently with other types of technology the other piece of it is fixed wireless networks have a lot of capacity so we're able to deliver very robust services to our customers now our average customer interesting statistic uses somewhere between 110 and 120 gigabytes of data per month and you'll notice probably on your mobile plan for example for access in the internet maybe you're getting a bucket of 10 gigabytes or 15 gigabytes and then your overages start kicking in the same as true of the satellite industry when you start doing the math if you're going to use 110 or 120 gigabytes of data a month on some other type of technology as in mobile wireless or satellite your bill is going to hit five six hundred dollars per month pretty quickly and on the fixed wireless side you know we can do this for $50 a month and you can have your 10 megabit plan your 20 your 50 and we just introduce 100 megabit plans the base stations currently deployed in our CBRS spectrum they're actually capable of 150 megabit services and with a CPE swap a little radio that you put on the home or the business that will enable 200 megabit services which is quite a bit for those that previously really didn't have much of a choice yeah that's that's a useful point about mobile because you start using you know even if you have an unlimited plan if you start using 120 150 gigabytes per month you're gonna get robbed right because they don't they're assuming you're you're still staying even quote unlimited you're still staying around you know certainly two digits like 10 or 12 or whatever it is Brian you make point to multi-point equipment can you explain a little bit about you know I guess on one hand you know how it actually what that actually looks like in a neighborhood and what kind of speeds you can actually deliver because a lot of folks say oh this all sounds good but they're thinking about mobile and they're thinking you know even 4G like oh we're really talking about maybe only 20 megabits per second or something but what are you actually delivering so I think the key about this comes back to the to the economics and I think all Americans would like to have fiber but again the economics are not gonna allow fiber but if we can deliver the equivalent of fiber and do it wirelessly that's that's really what we want to accomplish but we need to make the economics work and so what that means is that the equipment has got to be very affordable and it also means that point to multi-point is critically important so businesses that will pay a thousand dollars a month you could put a point-to-point link into those businesses using part 101 as an example of the framework you call license of thousand dollars a site kind of fees that you pay but when you get down to the consumer level that's not going to work and so this part of the proposal in the petition is that what we want to do is envision a point-to-multi-point network that extends down into the suburban areas and pay the fee let's say it's a thousand dollars for access point in the neighborhood but then what we need to do is we need to load that thing up with let's say 20 homes at a kind of a midpoint at least maybe 30 homes on it and at that point if we can do that we can make the economics work so we believe we have the equipment and technology that can drive this sort of gigabit speed and do it at a price point that's going to make sense for for Americans and so today for example you know Jeff is alluding to I think on average the stat right now is that we use about 190 gigabytes per month and the caps where it starts throttling on the unlimited data plans for about 22 gigabytes well so our job as a vendor is knowing that Jeff's going to charge 50 bucks a month that's where the price of people want to pay for service and today maybe they want a hundred meg service in the future to give him this this gigabit service we need to do that in a very cost efficient fashion part of its equipment and part of it is the spectrum so if we look at the and I recently blogged about this at the AWS three auction as an example it was an amazing success in terms of generating revenue for the treasury 41 billion dollars collected for 65 megahertz of spectrum and we were talking earlier about the mass spectrum we're talking about here which is 500 megahertz of spectrum and on the one level you'd say well that's a great thing for the United States it's 41 billion dollars revenue but where does that ultimately come from it comes from us as consumers that's why we have in part that's why we have these enormous cell phone bills that's why we pay on average six dollars per gigabyte for mobile data and we pay on average five cents per gigabyte for mobile data that's the difference and I think this is critically important for people understand the disparity between the economics in the mobile world and the fixed world we are those of us in the fixed world we have to have both low cost equipment and low cost spectrum to make this work yeah yeah thanks in fact you you often hear I still remember Reed Hunt right the former chairman of the FCC saying that he you know because of course it was under his chairmanship was the first auctions the first cellular options in the 90s and he said it really pained him to have the you know the suck money out of the telecom sector that drove up prices he said he wished they could do it with beads somehow you know you know in other words you want to do bidding but you don't want to drive with the price especially when broadband is an input to everything in the economy you know so all right well going to I think propagation is another important point here because as I mentioned we had an event last December and it's you know the hot new thing was these companies like starry in Boston Google bought web pass which was particularly a lot in San Francisco was company called monkey brains they are using equipment by sick Lou a an Israeli manufacturer but they all have in common and Verizon's doing this now in 28 is using this millimeter way this very high frequency spectrum to shoot you know point to point a lot of connectivity you know to an office building I mean and it's very interesting how this is really taken off mainly in places like downtown San Francisco not exactly where you think there's a big broadband gap right so so that's high frequency spectrum and we're talking here 3.7 about mid band I think Andy in particular maybe Brian talk a bit about you know what differences that make I mean why is mid band spectrum a different a difference maker or this sort of broadband gap deployment compared to say millimeter way which is the flavor the month happen as you go to higher frequencies propagation wise one is if you have line of sight between your transmitter and the receiver the what we call free space loss increases for the same type type type of antenna so your signal doesn't travel as far with the same signal strength as it would at a lower frequency the other thing that happens at higher frequencies is the impact of clutter gets more significant and by clutter we mean things like buildings and foliage trees and things like that cars that has a greater impact on reducing the signal strength so the millimeter wave spectrum signals in the millimeter wave spectrum generally don't go as far as signals in the mid band spectrum and signals in the mid band spectrum don't go quite as far as signals in the lower band spectrum this is not entirely a good or bad thing so for example if you're trying to reuse spectrum from one building to the next or from one neighborhood to the next having a frequency where the signals are attenuated pretty significantly between the building between the neighborhoods is actually a good thing so a millimeter wave you're going to provide a very localized network within a building you can share that same spectrum from floor to floor room to room building to building certainly and it's great the lower frequency spectrum so for example the 600 or 700 or 800 megahertz spectrum tends to go a much larger way so if you want to put up big macro cells and you want to provide service over long distances without having to put up a lot of cell sites it's more economical to use a lower frequency spectrum to do that the signals will go farther will penetrate trees and buildings better at the lower frequencies so the spectrum we're talking about here 3.7 to 4.2 sort of has characteristics that are between the millimeter wave and the low band spectrum and that is if you're high in the receiver and transmitter can see each other well the signals can actually go fairly far and I think in some of the world broadband type of applications they take advantage of that they put their central transmitter at a high site and then the homes or businesses have good visibility back to the base station but we've done a lot of propagation testing in 3.5 gigahertz we've actually done it here in the DC area spent a year doing drive testing there in the DC area what you find is if you're down in the clutter if you're within the buildings and below the foliage height and everything 3.5 gigahertz gets attenuated pretty quickly we show that a small like CVRS type base station would only have a useful radius of at most a kilometer and typically more like a couple hundred meters down in the clutter layer in a city like Washington DC so in the end the 3.5 this 3.7 to 4.2 gigahertz spectrum is positioned very well between the long distance propagation characteristics you get at lower frequencies and the very short propagation you get at the higher frequencies and this would be one of the first if not the first midband spectrum bands to be allocated for this point to multi-point or other uses and I think that ties in as well to the economics that Brian was talking about earlier if you if what makes us really affordable is you can put a whole bunch of homes on the same access points so in other words you only have to bring one fiber pop into the neighborhood you can load a whole bunch of homes on but imagine if you're out in I know whether Bethesda Gaithersburg whatever there's lots of trees Brian is that part of the part of why you want the spectrum as opposed to some other as you get past the Rockies it starts looking browner and browner and there's lots of places where you get a clean shot as we call it in the business but but the most of the you know United States and most of the world I would say trees are inevitable and at 5 gigahertz even at 5 gigahertz and you know Jeff can speak to this if you're out kilometers out providing traditional with service trees are not your friend you can't even shoot for one tree and even in these as we call it micropop model where you're trying to go 200 or 300 meters one tree if you go right through the middle of a deciduous tree that's the equivalent of a factor of 10 and distance so the signal strength that you would have gotten out at you know 10 kilometers that's now going to be the equivalent at one kilometer so it's it's a major hit and so getting lower in spectrum below 5 gig I think is critical so think over time what we're going to see is where today the Wisp industry is built around the 5 gig spectrum because it's free on a worldwide basis what we're going to see is that the point the multi-point services by necessity are going to go down in frequency so we get that near line of sight characteristics and at the backhaul links because we can engineer those they're just point to point we can engineer those to give us a clean shot we can move up in spectrum I think there's lots of spectrum up higher the 23 gig license and for example there's lots of spectrum up higher we're point-to-point links make sense okay I want to ask Ellen to start this will be pushing her a bit because she's inevitable she likes trees so what you were I just don't want to leave the impression unless unless it's true that libraries are unique here in a sense of you know what so libraries are lacking sufficient capacity in so many places and I'm sure it's particularly in these you know outer suburban excerpt in small town mentioned Boise etc so but what about I mean you think the same thing it's a more generalized problem right I mean in terms of schools other public institutions but even even small businesses if you have you know the dental office on you know in on the corner or an ATM machine or we just went through this whole thing with the business business data services and if if encompass was here the trade association represents the competitive local exchange carriers talk about how they can't get you know a good fast fiber connection in so many places or it's too expensive so I'm just wondering if you could just touch on the fact that you know whether this is only a library problem or more and in fact you know we've said as a policy matter that we the US has said as a policy matter that schools and libraries and certain healthcare institutions are critical and and so we we do some things with e-rate and with with funding to help them access broadband but as you mentioned Michael small businesses who who don't have that support and even you know the barrier to entry for folks trying to start a small business and you can't do it if you're not online so so we actually have stories from the ALA where folks use library resources use kind of these embedded startup small business incubators in libraries and score services that come through libraries and when they're ready for their storefront and they're ready to kind of transition out of that space one of the things that they're hit with as a cost that they never they have to anticipate now is access to high-speed broadband and and so not just to the cost but you know finding a location and citing their business and all of those things and so certainly libraries are not alone and institutions in general you know have a are facing a broadband gap across the US not just in rural areas but but in urban and suburban areas and small businesses as well since Calpex the only person I haven't picked on throw one his way and then and then hit one tough question and then go out to all of you so Calpex could you talk a little bit more about the satellite use of this band of the 3.7 to 4.2 and and I should mention just for symmetry and because this is actually in at least telecom news right that the Commission has you know notice of inquiry out where they're looking at you both ends of what I'm seeking comment on on both sides of this of this c-band the fixed satellite service as I mentioned this is the downlink portion where you have the earth stations with the seed dishes but then there's an uplink above 59 point 5925 500 megahertz which is the uplink portion which is entirely different matter because other chock full of another fixed point-to-point service as well but in this downlink I mean with 7000 registered earth stations it sounds like the bands very busy and if you could explain a little bit more about what makes it underutilized and how in turn can these very high capacity fixed wireless network share how can they manage to share with the band that seems you know I'm sure if Comcast or other companies were here today they'd say this is very vital that's how we get our programming you know to cablehead ends and so on let me let me take it from the top on this one to say how does satellite use the spectrum first globally is a variety of different ways there are telecom services in the band in Africa and in Asia and Latin America but in the United States it's predominantly video distribution so it is distributing CNN ESPN etc to cablehead ends from from the uplink centers of the broadcast so is this an important service absolutely it's an important service but when you talk about 7000 sites and the reality is it's probably a less than that that are it's actually in use because many of the the antennas that are still in the FCC database are it's old and inaccurate just the way that it's that it's kept but look at the geography of the United States and you recognize that 7000 sites is relatively small it's not relatively small it is so start with that the the geography itself means that there are plenty of places where there are not satellite receivers in place secondly the the very fundamentals of that business of video distribution is changing rapidly the biggest customers for the satellite industry are the broadcasters and the content provider they are looking at the consumption of that content changing dramatically from where we used to consume content on a linear basis I provide it when I provide it and you watch it then today our kids do not watch television in that same way they do not consume content in that same way and that changes the dynamics of that business first and foremost secondly I think the the economics of how the satellite industry in the C-band build satellite satellites for these distribution services is on an end-of-life deal basis meaning the economics are such that they will not build a satellite unless it is predominantly full on end-of-life deal with those content provider so you go to a content provider today and say look I'm interested in selling you capacity on a new satellite I'm thinking about building is even ESPN Viacom etc. going to be comfortable signing a 15 to 18 year lease end-of-life lease on that satellite I think they are coming to grips with that very question themselves of how does the economics look like going forward and so all of these factors drive to a situation where I think it is rational to look at the overall utilization of the fan I'm not saying by a long shot that satellites aren't going to continue to be an important an important player in this band and even more so globally I just think that the opportunities for sharing the opportunities for greater utilization of the band are significant and they're frankly going to be more significant going forward and I think from a satellite industry perspective there's a recognition of that sharing I really think creates real opportunities for them as I pointed out earlier both offensively and defensively so it really is something that it's the wave of the future I think that they have to put anyone else on the satellite I mean Andy you've done some research on this and also be interested to mention how how the sharing would be managed with right so one of the more interesting things we did early on two or three years ago as we looked at the set of a fixed satellite service dishes that are registered in the United States and we looked at Google Earth imagery of every registered location of every FSS dish in the FCC IDFS database and what we found if we use the criterion of actually locating a dish they're not hard to find we use the criterion of actually locating a dish within one kilometer of the license point 29% of the registrations did not actually exist they either were never built or in many cases using the timeline function of Google Earth you can see that they were removed five or ten years ago even and the database was never updated or they're just poorly licensed and they're not anywhere near where they say they are but the point is when the satellite industry is given 500 megahertz of spectrum for free and pays no penalty for having improperly registered sites or sites that no longer need to be registered there's no incentive for them to go back and clean up the database so many of you probably saw a fixed wireless communications coalition petition filed a few months ago that noted the inaccuracies of the database and we think that one of the first steps to examining the use of three dot seven four two would be a cleanup of the database and actually get an accurate picture of the sites that really exist and really need protection and I should further say that we found 29% of the sites didn't exist but that doesn't include sites where they may have left the dish there rusting and all we can tell from imagery is that the dish is still there but they may not even be using that site and we suspect there's a significant number of those but we can't tell that from the imagery as far as protecting these dishes I can tell you from designing our spectrum access system and our environmental sensing capability to deal with the military incumbents in the CVRS band they're a total surprise in fact that's the whole point they're surprised their operations are classified when and where they're going to operate their radars that need protection classified we have to sense them and avoid them I can tell you that at three to seven to four dot two where you know exactly where the dishes are that need protection and you know what frequencies are operating at and you know where they're pointing protecting those is a much more lightweight technology than protecting the military that can be almost anywhere on the coastline at any time so I can tell you that once the database gets cleaned up protecting the FSS sites much simpler than the way we're protecting the military in the CVRS and in fact the petition proposes that the proposes that the current part 101 coordination system which already exists you have a database and a coordinator that that can be used as is which might call manual coordination so the band could be put quickly to use but then over time it would be smart as as the Commission did with the 3.5 band to have a multi stakeholder group that would work on a more automated system because you can imagine if providers start flooding into the band and trying to occupy these vacant spaces it will be helpful to have a streamlined system so you don't have to pay a thousand dollars you know per access point just to coordinate and for fees and so on so one last question from me and then open it which is and I you know I mentioned there the Commission has you know it's coming we'll I'm sure be talking more about a notice of link inquiry looking at mid band spectrum so-called in other words below the millimeter wave from about 3.7 up to 24 you know they're saying tell us about you know which of these bands you know maybe could be repurposed or shared or otherwise changed to promote more connectivity and economic activity and one of the things you know things that has come forward is well you know why not take the same band this fixed satellite service being and just get rid of these guys like clear them out whether it be an incentive auction like we had just had for television or some other way and an auction at four from I think mobile broadband in particular so that's certainly going to be something that's talked about in terms of a longer term thing so I'm wondering how you all are seeing the interaction between suggestions that this could be a mobile band when you're saying you can use it right now as a fixed wireless fiber band whoever wants to start you know these mid bands in the three to four gigahertz it is really it's not a great band for mobile use mobile use is great for two gigahertz and under maybe two and a half gigahertz for capacity I think the mobile use in this band would be for urban hot spot indoor discrete capacity issues that they're facing not for appearing their critical traffic whereas on the other hand in a fixed environment like we've said it's pretty prime-grade spectrum there's a lot of it available it has the right propagation characteristics to deliver a solid service so in the hands of the mobile operator I do think they would use it in dense urban environments to relieve capacity problems they might be having but it really it's a waste of spectrum because you know that it'll never get used outside a dense urban area at least probably not in the next ten or twenty years yeah it's a good point so there could be in addition to any sort of short-term versus long-term distinction there's also potentially an urban world distinction yeah in terms of who would realistically use the spectrum and when Brian is doing the point so this is the concept of reappearing in FCC documents a flexible use spectrum and I just think the whole thing is a complete fallacy because what would happen if this spectrum came up for auction they would pay up they'd pay the big dollars because as Jeff said they're going to use this for infill they're going to use it for providing in the denser urban areas better better capacity for their network and so the economics support paying you know 40 billion dollars for the spectrum but then this flexible use doesn't happen because when you pay that kind of money you can't afford to provide affordable service for for consumers to provide fixed access at home so we're going to end up with an enormous bill if you use that spectrum if it ends up getting auctioned and moreover we're losing out on this critical time it's like probably the only way that we can have a competitive market for for fixed access in the United States we lose that opportunity entirely what about time frame I mean are these can we snap our fingers and the satellites will be gone I mean I don't know is what kind of process I mean even obviously there's going to be a political battle it has global implications but then there's probably also a time frame I mean I know it took almost you know the incentive option was because it had a statutory mandate went lightning fast fast by FCC standards right five five or so years and now we're looking at a three or four year transition period so that's that's kind of a long time I feel the sense of are these guys going lightly into the night are they vacating the FN anytime soon in different parts of the world you will see a different sense of deployment but satellite they keep building C-band satellites to provide coverages in different parts of the world and again I do think global harmonization in terms of spectrum is important and that's why all the more so trying to figure out ways to share with incumbents is a much better faster cheaper way to make that spectrum more available and better utilized so I think if the if the focus becomes let's figure out ways to clear the band so we can auction it and have exclusive licenses I think we are on a path to long-term delay to enable that and you only get it piece by piece by piece and I will say the battle over the spectrum really started it started with WRC 2003 in 2007 they nibbled away at getting a little bit of spectrum for mobile broadband terrestrial mobile it took until 2015 for the real three four to three six portion of the band to be given really for mobile broadband that's how many years to get a portion of the band and that was the easiest portion of the band the more difficult and more challenging is coming up yet the path forward seems to be we're still on the zero-sum game battle I think sharing is a much better option and accurate and for acronym patrol WRC is World Radio Conference right part of the process so because you said why it's actually serving other countries like Mexico and Canada here and one last quick thing for Andy is it is it conceivable to have both fixed and mobile in the same band so I'm you know I'm a little bit I have a slightly different opinion than some of the others on the panel with regard to the mobile use of this band I don't think it's impossible to get limited mobile use of the band in the not distant future I think there are some places where mobile service may be possible near-term on very limited basis and as the band evolves I think it's helped after saying it's going to take a while to evolve but as the band evolves there will be more openings for mobile service one of the things that we're noticing is that if you look at the history of license applications and license renewals for the C-band they're going down very rapidly before 2013 you had about several hundred license renewals filed every month for FSS dishes and what we've seen is since 2013 those numbers have dwindled down to a handful every month so we think there's sort of this natural reduction in the use of the band and maybe over time as more sites go offline there will be areas where on a technical basis mobile operations will be possible I think just given the amount of bandwidth there 500 megahertz and this goes to the point I was making earlier 500 megahertz is a lot of room for a lot of different applications and I think in theory you could have fixed point to multi-point operations you could have mobile operations in various segments of the band or dynamically allocated depending on the local circumstances as the band evolves and you know I think determining if that's how the band is actually going to evolve evolve is going to be more related to you know does the commission decide to make an exclusive use mobile spectrum and option it and it costs billions and billions to get a license well that will probably kill some of the use cases or will the commission continue on the track put forward by PCAST that it's better to share and allow flexible use and a variety of uses and not have licenses you know like in the CBRS band the whole point was to make licenses affordable and shorter term and allow innovation to happen if they allow that type of process to happen in 3.7 or 4.2 I think it could enable innovative new mobile use and fixed point to point point to multi-point I think there's enough spectrum there to support all of that well let's go out to the audience I think you had your hand up early but I was trying to get through my wrist which I miraculously did so tell us I'm Chris Savage with Davis right to remain this is a tech for the technical guys just I'm trying to get some real reality to this suppose there was a head-end you know the earth stations on top of this building right and then someone wanted to do one of these free at the mobile just the point-to-point fixed wireless could they have a fixed wireless antenna you know at the White House at the Pentagon and Rockville how far away does it have to be for this protection to work I'm just trying to picture it clutter is key here and this is what we found in the propagation studies clutter is key and understanding the placement of the antenna is key to all of this you say it's on top of the building that means that if you're on top of the neighboring building and the neighboring building is the same height no you probably couldn't put a base station because we've got line of sight but could you put some kind of system down at street level that had no visibility to the roof of the building and the roof of the building is 10 stories up and there's 10 stories of concrete between you and you know 10 floors of concrete between you and the backside of the sea band antenna yes you could do that if you look at the distribution of the FSS dishes 50% of them are in cities about a third of them are in rural areas and about a sixth of them are in suburban areas so that indicates to me that the place to start is potentially in suburban areas that might be where you can most easily fit in but the key to figuring out whether you can share is actually understanding the real environment if you assume free space loss or you use you know some generic model that doesn't take actual clutter into account no you'll find that the cord that the interference distances is going to be 10 or 50 or 100 kilometers in theory but in practice what we're seeing is that the actual interference distance can be on the order of a kilometer or even less depending on whether there's buildings and trees and things like that in the way and so the details matter in this case and one of the things that will make this band viable is the evolution of geo databases is is very rapidly evolving to where places like Google and others have very detailed information about buildings and foliage and things like that for urban areas and getting better all of the time and so by using that by leveraging that those pieces of information we think that you can you can fit in use of this band while not interfering with the FSS it's also I just add quickly to that even what you were talking about Andy was in a sense was the most maybe the most challenging where your co-channel I mentioned at the outset the Associated Prep has a huge number of these earth stations that are all you know pointing at one transponder of a satellite 23 megahertz so if you're if you're maybe you know on the other end of the band from them if you're you might be 100 megahertz away from them and it's going to be a lot easier to share part of it as well so currently to coordinate a fixed link which is why we don't see any very few fixed for us for links anymore to coordinate that today the protection that the satellite guys enjoy is what's called full arc which is say I have this enormous dish and pretend like the dishes pointed right at you are you going to interfere with it then that's quite different than the reality of the situation where the things are up at a 30 degree elevation and it's off axis from the dishes so without knowledge of that it makes it very difficult to coordinate anything so just in the very near term to get that information about what frequencies are they really listening to where's the dish pointed and then longer term getting all the obstructive data in there as well we have an opportunity to richly share the spectrum I think in the near term when we preview this petition for the bureaus in particular right international bureau wireless bureau OET I mean the heads were really nodding on this idea of let's let's at least find out the information like regardless of the merits here you know what you know that these databases this information really needs to be updated you know the reality I think what we're saying is proven by reality because if you look in the 3650 to 3700 megahertz band where some of the wisps operate and also some utilities operate in urban areas and things like that those are called part 90 operators they have to protect satellite systems that use an extension of the sea band that go down to below 3650 they have to protect those sites and the coordination distance the distance at which they have to if they're within 150 kilometers of one of these sites they have to go to that satellite operator and work out make sure that they're not going to appear if they're operating on the same frequency what we see if you go to the database you look at the location of these sea band dishes and you look at the location of the part 90 operations there are many part 90 operations that are within one kilometer of one of these dishes operating in the same band that tells us that operating that close to a sea band dish is is not only not impossible it's it's being done today right here oh he's got a microphone for you I can answer your question very quickly Joe Lenny Virginia broadband we are a wireless provider just 60 miles from here we had to apply we had to turn down our wattage we had to change our tilt because we are 80 miles away from the nurse station that we had to go through a lot of hoops just to broadcast this frequency so just 60 miles from here it's happening my name is Caitlyn Campbell and I grew up about 10 miles north of Charleston West Virginia and in the home where my parents like live and where I grew up the maximum download see we've ever gotten is 2.7 megabits per second but I I'm hearing you talk about fixed point and I've heard a lot about fiber because West Virginia just legalized broadband co-ops but I was curious if if the two services provide like equivalent speed and if vote for folks like for whom fiber isn't financially an option because if you're so far out from anywhere else will fixed point service be as sort of able to be upgraded over time and or I guess like with that system are we anticipating ways that technology will change in the near future so the folks kind of are getting the short end of the stick once the updates are to happen comments on that is it upgradeable sure it's upgradeable so there's the components of getting the service to your home there it's going to be the the backhaul or how do we connect our towers to get the bandwidth of the tower there's a radio that goes on the tower called an access point AP term and then on your home or on your business there's going to be a little radio about the size of a shoe or something like that cost couple hundred dollars those are the components and the systems are very easily upgradeable we have what we see now in the market software-defined radios so for example on a lot of our towers right now where we're providing an LTE grade service if we want to get 150 megabits of the home instead of 100 megabits or maybe they're just signed up for the 15 megabit plan truth be told really few people need more than 20 megabit service at home that's just all that entails is just swapping out at $200 piece of equipment on the eve of your house there it all depends what kind of technology you put up sometimes you have to change out these access points on the towers it might cost two three four thousand dollars per radio but just one of those access points is serving you know 50 customers 75 customers maybe a hundred depending on which flavor of access point you buy so yeah it is very upgradeable it's still a capital intensive business but it's nothing like the wireline business goes and the amount of time and money it takes to do upgrades you know system-wide for them we upgrade incrementally it's very success base if we want to upgrade service to your house we don't have to touch or upgrade the entire network just to do so. The other great thing about fixed wireless is once an operator comes into your neighborhood they put up that access point they can turn up service for you within a matter of a couple of days where if you did fiber you know you're looking at a long lead time to make that happen so the time to provide services once the infrastructure is in place is very fast and in a place like West Virginia for example is perfect example of why the spectrum we're talking about today is so important because even in the five gig band it's quite challenging in places where you have a lot of freeze even shoot a kilometer let alone the kind of distances that many WISPs network throughout so to get access to that the three seven to four two spectrum is critical for places like West Virginia that'll fix it at least for the American Library Association and I think for many institutions like we're both and strategy right it's fiber makes sense in and hybrid fiber wireless networks make sense you know it's so specific to the individual case but as both of you gentlemen mentioned like both of those no engineer correct me or do incredibly but it's switching the electronics right instead of digging it you know for fiber it is capital intensive but at the end of the day to upgrade to get faster service it is about switching the electronics which is why you know these kind of technology upgrades are so interesting to institutions who depend on the access but also who have to plan you know we have to plan 5 10 15 20 years in the future and what does that upgrade path look like for us and what are what are our bandwidth needs going to be I don't know if that complicated matters but yeah and that kind of goes along with the things been a recurring in here to some extent which is that this high-capacity fixed wireless is something that's really needed now and it's possible short-term I mean if it may be that you know whether just because we're more prosperous or for whatever reason that you'll have you'll have physical fiber trench to a whole lot more places in ten years but in the meantime there's this broadband gap and this is a very quick cost-effective way to do it if you have the right spectrum and enough of it I think there was one is it one of the questions yes on the middle Joe Colt with Honeycomb Networks I used to work a lot with the FAA on things that deal with global harmonization is there anything you've learned about Europe or other countries that we the FCC should be following and they're doing a much better job of it than we are the Europeans do certain things really well in intergovernmental organizations in terms of trying to line up their positions early and pushing for what they want but frankly the United States is not bad either in terms of how we approach such WRCs for lack of a better word and other things we always can look over you know the grasses greener on their side but they look at us and they look at our telecommunications infrastructure our wireless infrastructure and they are they are quite jealous of what we have here so who's doing it better I'm not sure I would agree with that characterization in yes I think in certain areas the Europeans may have made certain bands available sooner I will say though and things like CBRS and many of the wireless areas our approaches are more innovative our approaches are ahead of theirs I think oftentimes they their their style of regulation is much more of a top-down style which can lead to quicker decision-making earlier on but can lead to wrong paths that require slower turnaround and more cost over the okay oh I think there's you know to get up or have it over here real quickly we'll have to make these rightful rightful shot Q&A's. Hi Peter Flynn from Viacet I'm probably the only satellite represented here today. So I have a thank you so very much but in truth Viacet has actually been promoting shared spectrum for several years now and so I don't have a fundamental issue with much of what the panel has brought up spectrum is clearly underutilized not just in the satellite bands by the way but also in the cellular bands and in certain places in the Wi-Fi band so so the notion of spectrum sharing is a powerful notion that should be applied broadly here's my biggest concern is that when we slice up the band and we only talk about DSRC and other bands one slice at a time you always have a problem with the incumbent in that narrow slice fighting tooth and nail because it's all they're going to get. The one phrase I haven't heard of here from your panel was the notion of cognitive radios is if you have enough bands that are shared and if there is enough smart enough devices then clearly the utilization level shows that you can you can move to different bands as the demand requires it in order to avoid interference problems. Too much of our discussion has been well the solution to interference as we need to kick somebody out of the band. No the solution interference is people need to have smart enough radios that move to bands where there's not that interference and I want I want I really appreciate some discussion on this point because it's a it's a bit of a double-edged sword on one hand there's an open community approach and says well let's all share nicely but if we can't then we'll just kick the satellite guys out. No that's a little disingenuous but I think the better answer is to say if we if we can accomplish enough open unlicensed spectrum and we can have equipment manufacturers build smart enough devices that are more cognitive radio oriented so that they have mobility across those bands. This problem becomes a non-issue completely and and I haven't heard that part of the discussion from your from your panels. I think I don't disagree with anything you said so from the radio perspective one of the things we have to keep in mind is that the vast majority of the earth stations in this band are not two-way they're downlink only so cognitive is not the same as you know DFS for example in the five gig band we were listening and realizing other somebody there and or radar there I'm gonna go someplace else in this case the guy who's listening is completely quiet so how do we know about that that's for the database stuff comes in so the proposal and the petition is let's do the part 101 static thing initially because we can do that quickly we can turn that up in a matter of months and then over time I think it's been great things done in CBRS I don't necessarily agree with the licensing scheme with the pals but the technology is fantastic the SAS for example we could extend that SAS to include three seven to four two and we can include in the SAS way more than is in the international database right now so we can include the information about where it's pointed what they're listening to what the obstructions look like the train all that could be included in there so that when when a radio wants to turn on you have knowledge of what the situation is not only the satellites but also what other users are in the area so I think we have an ability to do that and the hard work that's been done in CBRS to now be extended and I think it's easier to address the dynamic use the cognitive radio as you say in the three seven or four two yeah couldn't agree with it more I think I think what has happened in CBRS is a great example of that the requirement that all radios be able to operate across the entire band gets to your point it's a subset of what you're talking about but it's exactly that make more spectrum available make it make it available on an unlicensed basis or a lightning-licensed basis you can solve many of these problems by doing just that and if you want to call them a crutch but a half-way house but moving in that direction but ultimately yeah cognitive radio that can you know detect and avoid certainly what I think probably what we would all hope for in the future is the most efficient so accesses and the sort of a cloud-based cognitive radio it's helping your hardware device figure out where it can transform it takes cases it takes care of the hidden node problem and things like that so in a way you can think we're evolving that way because it's sort of a cloud-based right okay well it's anything else I'm sure the panelists would be happy to talk to you off the side but we're supposed to end at 145 so I want to thank you all for hanging in until the end and thank the and please join me thanking the panel