 I'm happy to welcome you to the New America Foundation. My name is Sasha Minorath. I'm Vice President at the New America Foundation and Director of the Open Technology Institute. But you haven't come here for me. You've come here for this panel of experts who have been working diligently on different facets of wireless competition. So welcome to today's event. We can dive into the weeds as far as you guys would like to know. You'll be happy to know that there will be time for audience Q&A. So gin up your machinery and start thinking about what you would like to ask this crew. We're joined today by Rebecca Thompson, who's the General Counsel for the Competitive Carriers Association, Steve Sharkey, who's Director of Engineering and Tech Policy over at T-Mobile, my colleague Michael Calabrese, who's Director of the Wireless Future Project here at New America Foundations, Steven Renderos, who is working with the Center for Media Justice as their national organizer. And on the end there, we've got Matt Wood, who's the Policy Director for Free Press. And you also should have picked up, I hope, full bios of folks. Feel free to read them at your leisure. Friday is Chairman Jenikowski's last day at the FCC. Some will cheer, others will hang their heads in woe. I am certain. And of course, Tom Wheeler has been nominated as the replacement for him. And we'll undergo a to be determined length of time in purgatory as he awaits senatorial confirmation. And in the interim, Commissioner Clyburn will be the interim chairperson. And the question before us today is really, what is it that Clyburn can compete? If there's a lot of in-process proceedings and dockets, what can she focus on? And this area of wireless competition may not be the sexiest, but it is absolutely vital to the future of communications here in the United States. And so dealing with this, coming up with some ideas around which we can be productive and proactive, things that Chairman Clyburn can act on right now is all the more important. And so I'll kick it off with intro statements from folks here. I've got a few questions for them. And then we'll turn it over to all of you for audience and Q&A. But I thought I'd start with a couple of quick comments, some quoted from the FCC's wireless competition report to lay the groundwork. So the FCC states that antitrust authorities in the United States generally classify markets into three types. Unconcentrated with HHIs, that's Herfendahl Hirschman Index is of less than 1,500. Moderately concentrated with HHIs between 1,500 and 2,500. And highly concentrated, which have HHIs above 2,500. And since 2005, the HHIs and wireless have been above 2,700 and have been trending upwards to almost 2,900 in 2011. But, and this is from the executive summary of the report, consistent with the commission's first seven annual commercial mobile radio service competition reports, the 14th and 15 reports did not reach an overall conclusion regarding whether or not the CMRS marketplace was effectively competitive. So to help interpret what's happening in this space and give you some answers to perhaps the current state of market competition, where it might be strong and where it may be weak, we have this panel who will discuss some of the issues at play right now and hopefully illuminate us in ways that this report from the FCC systematically does not. And with that, I'll turn it over to Rebecca to get us started. Thanks Sasha. So I'm here to talk about interoperability, but Michael also asked me to talk a little bit about the state of competition in the wireless market as Sasha just teed up. So thank you very much to the numeric foundation for having us. And as you mentioned, this is a really timely panel with this being termed Genekowski's last week. I thought in terms of talking about competition might be good for me to start to talk a little bit about my organization, the competitive carriers association. We represent more than 100 competitive wireless carriers and more than 250 vendor suppliers in the wireless market. Last year, we went through a rebranding effort. We were formerly known as the Rural Cellular Association. We went through that effort for several reasons. We expanded our membership to include Sprint and T-Mobile. And perhaps more importantly, we rebranded because we realized that from Sprint, our member Sprint, all the way down to our member Bugtusser wireless, a small rural carrier in Wisconsin, that our members all share a common concern. And that is that the wireless industry is becoming increasingly consolidated among the top two largest carriers. And that CCA needed to focus its advocacy on restoring and reestablishing a robust competitive market. And as we all know, preserving competition is vital to economic growth, job creation, promoting innovation, and enhancing consumer welfare. Sasha already talked a little bit about some of the points in the Mobile Competition Report, but I thought it would be good to give you some examples of how consolidated the industry actually is. So over the past three years, in fact, the FCC could not categorize the mobile wireless industry as effectively competitive in its competition reports. And there's been a steady increase of HHI over the past couple years. And in particular, it's now 400 points higher than the level considered highly concentrated. 18 Team Verizon together account for 80% of industry revenues. And this, interestingly, this market share is higher than the market share for the top two firms and other consolidated industries. And as recently noted in a department justice filing, 18 Team and Verizon control 70% of all spectrum below one gigahertz. So really by any metric, this industry is becoming increasingly consolidated. This consolidation has occurred through a series of transactions over the past several years. Verizon, for example, recently acquired spectrum from the cable companies, AT&T acquired spectrum from Next Wave and Qualcomm. And that's not to mention many of the smaller secondary market transactions that have occurred by CCA's own numbers. Verizon and AT&T account for 55% of all the secondary market transactions in 2012 and 70% of those under one gig. In the years past, the wireless industry was a shining example of competition which led to light touch regulation, allowing our members to grow and thrive. But as a result of this consolidation, we now need some simple targeted rules that allow our carriers to compete. So that generally includes three things, access to spectrum, access to networks and access to devices. It is often said that spectrum is the lifeblood of the wireless industry. And I know Steve's gonna talk a little bit more about spectrum caps, but it's essential that the commission prevent undue spectrum aggregation by Verizon and AT&T. And in particular, also creating fair rules for auctions so that carriers can compete. CCA in the spectrum aggregation proceeding or the mobile spectrum holdings proceeding, CCA has asked that the commission complete that's proceeding by the year's end, but in fact, the records complete and that a decision's right for review there. Access to networks, that's also critically important not only in the form of voice and data roaming onto Verizon and AT&T's wireless networks, but also in the form of basic interconnection rights to their wire line affiliates. And as AT&T is noted in the IP transition, technologies are changing, but it's critical that these roaming and interconnection obligations remain strong so that the larger carriers aren't able to foreclose competition by denying access to their vast networks. And finally, access to devices. The FCC has recognized that handsets and devices are a central part of a consumer's mobile wireless experience. And it's just increasingly important that our members have access to devices and can't be locked out from bringing their devices and being used on a competitive carrier's network, which leads me to interoperability. The bottom line with interoperability is that without it in the lower 700 megahertz spectrum, smaller carriers don't have the scope and scale to get access to devices for the A block only. Let me give you a little bit of background on the proceeding. It's been going on, this issue's been before the commission for five years. The spectrum was auctioned in 2008. At that time, the lower 700 megahertz was auctioned off under band class 12. Our members spent nearly $2 billion in that auction and post auction AT&T bifurcated the lower 700 megahertz band separating A from blocks B and C. They did so claiming interference from Channel 51 broadcasters. The following year, a coalition of A block licensees petitioned the commission to restore device interoperability. And it wasn't until 2012, just last year that the commission finally adopted an MPRM on this proceeding. So for the past five years, A block licensees have spent significant time and effort proving that AT&T's interference claims are false. And in fact, field and lab tests have revealed that there's no interference risks to lower B and C block operations from an interoperable device. In addition to the technical analysis, our members also conducted along with CCA a cost benefit analysis. And that revealed that the costs to restoring interoperability are minimal while the benefits are widespread and they include reduced network equipment costs, accelerated innovation and faster LTE build out. So where are we now? AT&T has launched over 200 LTE markets. Verizon's launched nearly 500. And AT&T has effectively used its market power to bifurcate the lower 700 megahertz spectrum and for close competition from competitive carriers. Commissioner Clyburn has been a champion for competitive issues and in particular interoperability from the time of the Qualcomm's transaction to just a month ago in front of Congress. She has often talked about the importance of this issue. And so we are hopeful that during her tenure as interim chairwoman that she would take up this issue and act on it. The record's complete and it's conclusively proven that restoring interoperability is in the public interest and we're very hopeful that she's going to act on it. Doing so will provide consumers in rural and regional markets access to LTE service but beyond that it will help generate interest and desire to participate in incentive auctions and hopefully thereby increasing auction revenue and also allow public safety to connect to multiple networks and reducing the cost of devices. If they don't act on it, they will, the commission will be stranding 12 megahertz of prime spectrum and $2 billion in investment. So now is the time to complete this unfinished business. Thank you, Rebecca. Steve, you represent one of the big four, level playing field, everything peachy keen from your side of things, right? Why don't you give a little lay of the land from your perspective? So thanks and Rebecca did a nice job of laying out some of the competitive issues and we certainly think it's a competitive environment right now and we're rolling out new plans and services to try and ensure that it does remain a competitive industry but there are a number of things that, and other things that Rebecca addressed that really impact the ability to compete and I'm gonna focus on one of those as kind of an underlying basis for competition that is access to spectrum. It is a fundamental part of what we do and as we see the demand for data services continue to grow and beat any expectations about how those services grow, especially as we roll out new generations of handsets, we see the growth of data continue to ramp up. We think all the carriers are very aggressive about rolling out new technologies, more efficient technologies and using the spectrum efficiently but everything that we do doesn't ultimately keep up with that growth for data and the only way we're gonna meet it is with new spectrum. So there are a number of areas where I'm sure everybody is familiar with the broadband plan that was released almost three years ago that called for 500 megahertz of spectrum to be made available within the next 10 years or 10 years from three years ago. And frankly, since then we've seen very little actual spectrum made available for new services but we have seen progress towards making some spectrum available and I'll focus on really three of those. The first one is incentive auctions. This is the auction to repurpose broadcast television spectrum and make it available for commercial mobile use and it is probably the most important action that's coming up in this area for the foreseeable future. It is very valuable spectrum, low band spectrum, below one gigahertz. The below one gigahertz spectrum is particularly valuable because of its propagation characteristics. So you can cover rural areas with less infrastructure. It gives better building penetration so it creates a very good fundamental underlay for coverage and expanding coverage to a large number of people whereas higher band spectrum can fill in for capacity. Rebecca mentioned 18 teen Verizon combined have about 75% of the spectrum below one gigahertz right now. So there is not a lot of other spectrum out there. There is none that's really available for a competitive carrier to access that and frankly from T-Mobile's perspective it is we're the only of the big four carriers that don't have any low band spectrum so this becomes particularly important to us. We're focused on three areas within the auction. First it is a competitive auction and that goes to the ability of competitive carriers to compete effectively in the auction and walk away with spectrum. We've proposed a number of steps to try and ensure that this is the case. One of the things that we don't want to see is for Verizon and AT&T to come in and be able to buy up the vast majority of these valuable resources and increase or maintain that 75% to 80% hold on spectrum below one gigahertz and I think we saw that happen in the 700 megahertz auction where they were able to obtain that the vast majority of resources there. So we've proposed that there be a cap of one third of the spectrum below one gigahertz for this auction. So anybody you would look at a carrier's total spectrum holdings below one gigahertz and you wouldn't be able to exceed a one third cap. This does a couple of things. It allows all the carriers to compete in the auction. If there's enough spectrum made available, so we look for at least 84 megahertz of spectrum, hopefully 120 megahertz of spectrum will be made available in this auction and all the carriers would be able to compete including AT&T and Verizon and obtain spectrum in the auction but would not be able to increase there or dominate the auction to the point where they would foreclose competitors from getting additional spectrum. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the advocacy that we've had around a cap in this auction which actually provides a lot of clarity about what a carrier can expect to do in the auction and will drive greater interest in the auction, greater participation in the auction because competitive carriers will feel like they've got a chance to get spectrum in the auction rather than just be foreclosed by kind of the big two carriers but there's been a lot of noise recently in a number of reports and a number of advocacy efforts to try and frame our position as saying that we're trying to foreclose AT&T and Verizon from competing at all in the auction and that is certainly not the case. Nobody has ever said that they should not be allowed to participate in the auction. In fact, all the competitive carriers want them in the auction. They drive a lot of economies of scale when they're in the marketplace and everybody expects them to be there. There is nothing on the record where anybody has said that they should be foreclosed from competing. So what we're looking for is kind of a reasonable structure that allows them to obtain spectrum but also allows others to obtain spectrum and not have them dominate the auction. Second issue for us in incentive auctions is to make sure that there's a BAM plan that maximizes the amount of paired spectrum available. All the carriers really deploy spectrum in both an uplink and downlink and we've put forward a BAM plan that would allow up to 35 by 35 megahertz of spectrum and allow at least three carriers to get two by 10 or two by 20 megahertz of spectrum in the auction. So a good foundation for LTE services. There's one of the issues that we're dealing with in the record is some claims of small technical issues that would get in the way of this. So we think it's important to push forward and get enough paired spectrum out there. And then interoperability. Rebecca touched on the device interoperability aspect and did a good job about describing the importance of this and we do wanna make sure that we don't have a repeat of what happened at 700 megahertz. We wanna make sure that there is no opportunity for dividing off a separate band class to have one carrier come in, get all of its spectrum in a single portion of the spectrum and then go and divide off its own class of devices that forecloses others from, what makes it more difficult for others to get devices. And we've proposed a couple of things to do that first that the FCC should adopt an interoperability requirement. Just an outright requirement that devices be able to cover all the spectrum that's paired spectrum that's made available. The second one would do a random pseudo random assignment of licenses from area to area. So if you are in one area, you may get a license in one portion of the spectrum if you're in an adjacent area or another area, you would probably get a license in another part of the area. And this helps eliminate any ability or incentive to divide off a single band class and segment the device market. Second area on spectrum I wanna talk about is government spectrum, making government spectrum available. 1755 to 1780 megahertz paired with AWS-3 spectrum at 2155 to 2180 megahertz. The two gigahertz 2155 spectrum has been available for a long time and we've been struggling with how to pair that. So we've had a significant effort to try and free up spectrum in the 1755 band that is currently used by government incumbents. There has been, and the primary government incumbent is DOD. Here's been a lot of work here, a lot of attempt by the Department of Commerce to create a working group through its Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee to put engineers in a room to figure out how can you make this work and is sharing possible. We've had some good discussions, but the process is deeply mired right now in very worst case analysis and we have not been able to break through kind of a DOD roadblock towards really cooperative and interactive discussions on how to solve this problem. So I think, you know, on initiatives that Commissioner Clyburn can push forward is to continue to push forward on that to try and facilitate making that spectrum available. And then the third spectrum issue that I wanted to touch on just quickly is the 3.5 gigahertz spectrum. The commission has a proposed rulemaking out for the 3550 to 3650 band. It proposes a very complicated three-tiered structure of protection. Tier one would be protecting some of the incumbent users, including government and satellite systems. They create a second tier, which would create a special group of users that would include hospitals and other special services. And then there's kind of a third tier that is available to everybody else. You know, we wanna see that simplified and in fact wanna see some of that spectrum made available on a licensed basis rather than what is essentially an unlicensed basis in the proposal. That spectrum has got a lot of potential to serve for small cells that can provide a lot of capacity in urban areas and making it available on an unlicensed basis doesn't, we'd like to say it made available on a way that facilitates deployment of LTE technology, which is the underlying technology that all the carriers are moving to and that doesn't operate well in an unlicensed environment. So we'll get more efficient use and I think better use out of it on a licensed basis. So we'd like to see at least some of that carved off for licensed. And I think that's one that Commissioner Clyburn would be able to move forward on as well. Thanks, Steve. Let me turn it over now to Michael Calabrese that might have a thing or two to say on spectrum. I dare to believe that you might have some words of wisdom given the dozen plus years you've been working on a lot of these issues. Thanks, Sasha. And if anybody would like to, in the back would like to sit, there's still some seats up front here. So I wanna focus on the sort of pick up a bit where Steve left off and focus on the urgent need to open access to more spectrum and in particular more unlicensed spectrum. So there's two FCC rule makings that are critical in this respect and fairly far along and Steve mentioned them. One is the incentive auction process to reallocate TV band spectrum from broadcasting to broadband. The other is opening the underutilized 3550 to 3700 megahertz band for sharing with Navy radar and creating thereby a citizen's broadband service which has been proposed by the FCC. Both have a record now chock full of extensive comments and reply comments as well as the benefit of FCC workshops and extensive debate. So the acting chair should in both cases move now toward drafting an order. It's well known that consumer demand for wireless data continues to increase rapidly. Both US and global wireless data traffic increased 70% last year. In the US smartphone penetration just reached 50% and just one in five households owns a tablet. That means we are at most halfway through a transformation to mobile internet access as consumers try to do everything on their mobile devices that they do on their home PC. So has this created the spectrum crisis that Chairman Genekowski has talked about for years? Well fortunately not yet. The happiest contradiction in telecom policy today is the gap between claims of a looming spectrum crisis and the reality that consumers rely increasingly on unlicensed spectrum to satisfy their exploding demand for video music and other bandwidth intensive applications. Today less than two thirds of smartphone traffic and less than 10% of iPad traffic travels over carrier networks. The rest is transmitted a very short distance at low power over unlicensed spectrum and into a wire line network that the end user or their employer or some other business has already provisioned. This is called Wi-Fi offload and it's a huge trend that we barely see the glimmerings of in the US so far. So in the US, and a lot of people don't realize is the cable industry, five cable companies have already deployed 125,000 Wi-Fi hotspots to take mobile device traffic. But that's nothing compared overseas. In the UK, British Telecom, which is a wire line only company has turned five million of their residential and business customers into Wi-Fi hotspots. They also have access to another 3.5 million Wi-Fi hotspots across Europe, all part of the FON consortium. Since most video and other high bandwidth apps on mobile devices are used indoors and within range of a wired local area network, widespread availability of Wi-Fi on unlicensed spectrum is the single most important factor in mitigating the spectrum crunch. There is nothing that comes close in terms of addressing this. A recent Cisco survey found that mobile devices are used 85% of the time at work, at home, or in locations with wired networks that either do or could easily offer Wi-Fi offload. Cisco survey also found that both individual and business users overwhelmingly prefer to connect to Wi-Fi rather than their carrier's network. As fiber and other high capacity wire line networks become more ubiquitous, the ability of mobile devices to transmit data short distances over shared spectrum into less traffic sensitive wired networks can replace the spectrum crunch with wireless bandwidth abundance. The key policy obstacle to this pro-consumer outcome, however, is progress on the FCC's efforts to open the most underutilized bands for unlicensed sharing. This is why advancing the incentive auction and the citizen broadband proceedings in a balanced way, balanced between licensed and unlicensed, is mission critical for Chairwoman Clyburn. First, the wireless bureau and OET should move to drafting an order that implements the citizen's broadband service as proposed in the NPRM for putting the 3.5 gigahertz airwaves to use, because they're mostly now fellow. The commission has proposed the same three-tier access framework for spectrum sharing that was proposed last summer by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Adopting that three-tier approach and working out interference protection with the military is urgent because it provides a foundation for opening as much as 1,000 megahertz of federal spectrum for sharing where it's unlikely that the feds are going to move off or if they do it will be a decade or more from now. This is what PCAST called a virtual spectrum superhighway. National markets for unlicensed innovation are likewise at stake in the TV incentive auctions. Currently, the staff seems focused entirely on band plans, auction mechanics, and how much money might be raised or given away to the broadcasters. Chairwoman Clyburn has an opportunity to not only push the staff to begin drafting an order, but also to direct the staff to make the nationwide availability of a robust amount of unlicensed TV-band spectrum, so-called TV white space, a priority rather than an afterthought. Commons filed not only by our consumer coalition, folks at the rest of this table, but also by tech giants, rural ISPs, WISPA, and the cable industry all urged the FCC to ensure that the equivalent of five or six TV channels remain available for unlicensed use nationwide even in the biggest cities. An expedited and balanced outcome is within reach on both TV-band and federal spectrum sharing, but it will take direction from the top to keep it moving. Thank you, Michael. Now I'll turn it over to Steven, who has been working with the Center for Media Justice. You know, I think about all I hear about in sort of a number of DC circles is we've got to stop these cell phones from ending up in prison. And of course, my brain goes straight to, you've got to be really committed to getting a cell phone into a prison. Because, well, they're already doing full body searches. So where these cell phones have been, I don't even want to think about. And the question in my mind then is, why would I be so motivated to bring a cell phone into that environment in the first place? And that's what I'm here to answer, so thanks. So my name is Steven Rendetto. I'm the national organizer at the Center for Media Justice. We're a national movement building intermediary. We work to set the media conditions that support our movements for social justice, racial equity, and human rights. We manage a national network of about 153 organizations across the country called the Media Action Grassroots Network. And we utilize that network to inject our voices, the voices of communities of color, rural communities, and other marginalized communities in debates over media policy. So you might be wondering what prison telephones have to do with this conversation around wireless competition. And I see a few parallels. One is when we're talking about competition, prison telephones is certainly an industry where there is very little competition to begin with. Additionally, when you think about the communities that are being impacted the most, from a lack of affordable and quality, be it wireless service or prison telephone service, some of those communities happen to look and feel very much the same. And then lastly, when you think about unfinished business, which is the theme for this convening, my thinking is that a proceeding that's been sitting at the FCC for about 13 years probably qualifies. So certainly prison telephones is part of this discussion. I want to give you a quick kind of background on the industry itself. Talk a little bit about who's being impacted by the issue, and then lastly give you a sense of the history of the issue at the FCC. The reality is that to make a phone call from a prison in the United States is a very costly endeavor. It is actually cheaper to call a place like Singapore than it is to receive a phone call from a prisoner. A lot of phone calls from prison can cost upwards of about $20 for a 15-minute phone call, which when you think there are very few kind of comparable situations in our society nowadays when we think about our access to telephone. I was at a dinner last night where someone was making the comparison between what some customers have to pay for prison telephone rates to what some people have to pay for calling those CD 900 numbers. And as someone to paraphrase them said, it's loved ones who want to stay in touch with their prisons with prisoners are paying about the same rates as folks that are searching for new loved ones. So it's unfortunate that those are the comparisons we have to make to find where these high phone rates are actually happening in our society. The prison telephone industry is a $342 million industry, and that's just looking at state prisons alone. When you include juvenile detention facilities, private detention facilities, local jails, the number skyrockets to about $1.2 billion. So it's a big industry. And in this industry, speaking to the lack of competition, there are about two or three companies that dominate a huge portion of the market. The two biggest ones are GlobalTel Link and Securus Technologies. They collectively make up about 60% of the industry. Century Link is another player in the prison telephone industry, not as big in the industry as the other two, but they're in it. Part of the problem when we think about the high phone rates, it has to do with the bidding process, how contracts are actually given out by departments of corrections, local agencies. They prioritize giving out their contracts based on the company that can provide them the highest commission rates. And commissions are essentially a portion of the money that these companies are generating through phone calls that get kicked back to states and local agencies. And these commissions in some states are being utilized to fund inmate welfare programs, but in other states are not being utilized, are just simply going to general operating funds. And one good example of that is here in the, well not here, but in Maryland, about $1.2 million are generated in commissions every year, but only about 500,000 of that actually goes to pay for some of these programs. The rest just goes into general operating. What it looks like in terms of actual rates, we're looking at 89 cents a minute in some states that are the most egregious, states like Alabama, Minnesota, Washington, are charging upwards of 89 cents a minute. And on top of that are charging families of prisoners who are the actual consumers of this product and the ones that are actually paying for this, charging fees that are upwards of $4, $5 to connect the phone call. So when you add it all up, we're talking about $20 for a 15 minute phone call, hundreds of dollars if you have any hope of maintaining regular contact with your loved one inside. Back in 2000, a group of families of prisoners were getting fed up with having to pay these high phone bills. And so they actually sued a number of the companies in a class action lawsuit that was put together by the Center for Constitutional Rights. And back in 2000, the judge, or actually in 2001, the judge decided that she couldn't actually rule on the case and she punted it to the FCC because she felt the Federal Communications Commission was in the best position to regulate the prison telephone industry. And in her order, as she sent it off to the FCC, she assumed that the FCC would act with dispatch to address this issue, which of course, 13 years later, we're still waiting. Back in 2003, the plaintiffs from the case filed a petition for rulemaking, which eventually became known as the right petition. And then again, in 2008, filed an alternative proposal for rulemaking and in that particular case, actually put forward a recommendation that the FCC adopt a cap on interstate prison telephone rates of about 20 cents for debit and collect calls and 20 cents for debit calls and 25 cents for collect calls. Comments were filed, public comments were received, but still really no action on the part of the FCC. A couple years ago, my organization, the Center for Media Justice, along with Prison Legal News, who has been an immense resource in terms of aggregating the data behind this industry and working narratives, a collective of criminal justice advocates and artists, decided to put forward a campaign to kind of reinvigorate and try to get the right petition passed again. And through the campaign, what we've been able to do is really elevate the voices of the people who are being most directly impacted by this, both prisoners and their families and bringing those voices here to the FCC. Around the same time, a lot of public interest organizations and civil rights organizations based here in Washington DC were interested in taking up the issue as well. And so some of our strongest allies through this campaign have been folks like the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights, Free Press, NAACP, the National Urban League, have all been a part of the fight. And we've also made some very interesting, strange bedfellows. We've gotten a lot of support from conservatives who believe that this gets in the way of really keeping families together. And we've been able to get state elected officials to elevate their voices as well and chime in that the FCC hasn't authority over this issue and is something that needs to be done. What we were really pushing for at the early stages of this campaign was to get the FCC to issue another notice of proposed rulemaking because of course, so much time has passed that the data around this issue became obsolete in some ways. And so just a few months ago, the FCC finally did issue a further notice of proposed rulemaking and we were able to generate hundreds of comments into the FCC, thousands of petitions, I think over, at last count, over 50,000 petitions came in during the public comment period, which just recently wrapped up. And now we're sitting in a similar place that this issue has sat at before, which is people have spoken up and have said that this is an issue, this is an issue that's deeply and widely felt. But what we'd like to see happen differently this time around is that the FCC actually issues an order. Where part of what's at our advantage at this point is we have the interim chair is someone who's been a strongly vocal advocate for this issue at the FCC, Commissioner Chairwoman Clyburn, has been a strong champion for us. And so we hope that moving forward that she'll put the resources that are necessary in terms of getting an actual rule done and not wait any longer, because it's been 13 years and I'm pretty sure families of prisoners would like to stay in touch with their loved ones pretty soon, so. Thank you, Steven, powerful stuff. Matt, you've been in the trenches, working at the forefront of Wonkery at the FCC and elsewhere. Since your batting cleanup, feel free to expound on anything here, bring up maybe authority or anything else you'd wish to discuss. Sure, yeah, the Wonkery trenches, I kind of like that. Although maybe most people wouldn't like that. Yeah, I have a couple of luxuries going last. I mean, I can kind of say us too on a lot of these issues as free press and public knowledge and OTI and a lot of folks have worked together on these issues. I'll probably swing back on touch on a few of them but we really have run the gamut and worked side by side with CMJ. I hope doing enough to help support this tremendously important campaign and working with other groups on the competition issues you heard about, interoperability, unlicensed spectrum, all that good stuff. Couple of things I'll add and maybe cheating the debate question a little bit about what can Commissioner Cliver and do unfinished business. I mean, I think there's a lot of unfinished business out there. I'm not entirely sure how much an interim chair can do and I think it's up to us to consumer advocates, public interest organizations, advocates of any stripe to push and to look for solutions and answers. But I think maybe that the most we can hope for in some cases just due to political inertia and other institutional deference and factors that are maybe outside of an interim chair's control is for her to keep the ball moving. And I think Michael touched on that in a couple of places. You know, you hear us saying things like, prepare an order but not necessarily vote it. I don't want to set the bar too low for an interim chair but I also don't want to set it too high and think that they are likely to proceed to a vote when it's going to be two to one or even three O and you don't have the full complement of commissioners. Not only do we have a new chair coming in but of course there's a new Republican side commissioner coming in as well. Nobody's sure who that's going to be yet but that will be the person to replace departing commissioner McDowell. So we'd like to see a lot of things done, a lot of unfinished business. Love to see some of it done in the next couple of weeks, months, what have you, whatever it turns out that chairwoman Clyburn has but it's not entirely clear to me how much she'll be able to accomplish in whatever amount of time she has. So I'd add a few things to the mix besides everything you've heard about. One is just generally assessing the level of competition and I, a lot of people in this room have worked on this too. That requires data. You know, we had a FCC chair in Genekowski who came in and said, we will be a data-driven agency that's administration has promised to be very open and transparent tangent and footnote but in the week of press leak prosecution you have to sort of ask questions about how successful they've been. It's a tough thing to do to change the culture and to be more transparent. This FCC I think has asked more questions and sort of teed up more issues about what kind of data we have, what kind of performance are we actually seeing in the market but hasn't always answered those questions or even let other people answer those questions. And what I mean by that is Sasha started by invoking the national broadband plan. A couple of things in there are suggested that the FCC should collect more granular broadband deployment data, pricing data and not just collect it but also turn it over to researchers like the team they have here in this building and like our organization and others of all stripes in the industry as well to actually look at the market structure and beyond just the structure, beyond just the HHI numbers which are incredibly important and informative but don't really tell you how people are acting in the market. You know, look and see our prices actually going down or up and not just per minute pricing. You can have a company say, well, now you get unlimited voice. I talk a lot but I can't use unlimited voice. So for them to say my per minute cost has gone through the floor is really not that important to me. What's important is the amount I'm paying at the end of every month. Just looking at data like that that is out there, you know, might need to be behind a protective order but should be at least available to the people making the decisions at the FCC and then available to consumer advocates and industry analysts who are willing to get in there and look at that data and work with it and really just again, look at how the market acts and how it feels to real people rather than only relying on something that's important, mergers and acquisitions and all that stuff. And that terribly important to know how many people are in the market but just as important to know what they're doing and whether prices are heading north or south based on supposed competition. That's the whole game with effective competition and I guess that's probably the only place where we part ways slightly with T-Mobile and with CCA about, you know, the wireless industry used to be a shining example of competition. It's always been more competitive than the wire line side. I guess we just still have questions about how competitive it was and more importantly how competitive it will be as the industry trends continue. One thing that perhaps commissioner and then chair Clyburn could do in that regard is the special access proceeding. Talk about stuff that is long overdue. It's a little bit distressing to sit here and see former FCC staffers in the audience and people say, you know, they should act with dispatch and it's been a decade and people say, yep, that's the way it goes. Unfortunately, that's the way it is. The special access proceeding was kicked off by then competitive company AT&T. After the initial breakup, we had, you know, interim period AT&T as we talk about interims here today. And they said, oh, the FCC deregulated this stuff that basically dictates how companies buy transport capacity from each other. You know, I make a wireless call. It goes to a tower and then where does it go after that? It has to get back into the network. So special access is this kind of catchall category for a lot of transport of data and your voice calls that companies do behind the scenes back into the network. And the FCC largely deregulated that at the turn of the century, like 99 through 2001 by a couple years later, AT&T as a competitor then comes back in and says, hey, this didn't work. Prices are actually going up. So the supposed effective competition test that you've developed for these inner workings, these kind of ways that companies deal with each other are not working. The prices are going up and up. And so we ask for reform of that. We AT&T flash forward nine years or so here and AT&T is in a very different posture in that proceeding because they are now themselves once again on the other side and the people who own not just the cell tower capacity but also the wires behind them. But that's been going on for a long time. You know, as I said at the outset, this FCC has asked a lot of good questions. I think in no other proceeding is this really quite as true as this one. They ask questions and then you go 10, 11, 12 months later and they ask the questions again. Time to refresh the record. We really mean at this time, guys, give us some more data. There've been concerns and complaints on both sides about who should be kicking in, what answers. And you know, that's all valid. We can talk about that, but just maybe moving that forward once again, I just don't see them getting to a vote on that. The other thing I do want to mention and then Sasha oppresses this a little bit is the authority question. I think that's really at the heart of a lot of what we're talking about up here. The FCC should do X, Y and Z to improve competition in the wireless industry or in the broadband industry more broadly or Stephen is talking about in the wireline telephone and specifically prison telephone industry. The FCC has all sorts of authority to do things in the communications act. You might hear sometimes that we have to rewrite the whole act and start all over again. We at Free Press don't share that view. We think obviously there are changes in the technology going on, but there are lots of things that can be done under the current act. It's just that for the past decade or so the FCC has done its best to give away its authority or cast doubt on its authority over things like mobile broadband telecommunications. Those are all magic words in the law, but what I mean by that is broadband is different from a voice call, but it's not that different. You know, you have the same people who control the infrastructure, the same people who are offering you service and either competing or not competing based on their position in that market structure. And the FCC we think clearly under the statute has a continuing obligation to oversee that space and that there's still a role for public telecommunications in this country as there is in every country. And this FCC largely in the last presidential administration, but continuing into this one has basically done a patchwork quilt approach to its authority over broadband communications. So something like data roaming. I think Rebecca might have mentioned or Steve might have mentioned, something where again, a lot of people at this table and in this room are aligned on that issue. The FCC survived a court challenge there and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said, yes, you do have the authority to impose data roaming obligations on other carriers, but it was a pretty close call and we have the same kind of issues coming up in the upcoming net neutrality case. You know, the FCC again, not necessarily on bad authority, but needing to cobble together different sources of authority just to wriggle its way through some loopholes in the existing law and some loopholes and I guess I'd say pitfalls of its own making through a series of bad decisions on just how to treat these things and whether or not this is still a telecommunication service or not. So I'll probably stop there. As I said, I think everybody else covered the issue as well. You probably saw a little bit of difference between just how much we on the public interside and the tech side focus on on licensed versus the carriers. I think as Michael said, the answer there is balanced to auction some things off for sure, but to also preserve this open space for innovation, spectrum aggregation, we've been in that docket as well and have some slightly different answers there but all pushing in the same direction certainly as CCA members and as T-Mobile. A lot of things that this commissioner and this interim chairwoman can do to again push things forward. I just don't know how many votes we'll see to actually finally answer some of these questions and to proceed with dispatch to get to a final order on a lot of these very important issues that the previous and now outgoing chairman didn't really answer. Thank you, Matt. So I'm gonna ask a few questions and then turn it over for audience QA. This also includes the Twitter stream, which I've been watching sometimes with rye amusement. Thank you all for weighing in on that medium for sure. And I'm gonna ask sort of a provocative question and as with any provocative question, there's the possibility I may stick my foot into my mouth. I just hope I won't. But on the one hand, we're talking about prisons and prisoners and a bidding process meant to maximize revenue for the prison industrial complex and a marketplace that's dominated by just a couple of companies that own most of the market share in that space, which yields unbelievably expensive rates for prisoners. And on the other hand, again, without equating these two things, you've got normative contractual lock-in for consumers. You've got incentive auctions created to maximize revenue for the treasury. You've got a market sector dominated by two major players. And as the OTI documented in our analysis of cell phone rates all around the industrialized world, we pay amongst the highest period in the OECD. Are there, without equating these two things, but are there parallels to be drawn? Are there lessons that we might learn or glean from these two scenarios? Let's just go down the line. You might want to start this end of the line. Go ahead. Go ahead. Matt, volunteer. Let's go this way. No, our runs will go forward. Rebecca, if you really want to go first. I just want to say, I mean, we did draw, again, without equating the two things, but we did draw some comparisons like that in the comments that we filed in the prison phone proceeding. It's certainly not the same story. You do have a, you know, quite literally captive audience with prison phones. It's not a joke, but it's funny that we talk about captive audiences out on the outside here and here you do have that exact situation. I would agree though, Sasha, it's provocative, but I mean, I do think, you know, there are comparisons to be drawn just from what you see when you have a lack of competition in any space. And so that's incredibly exacerbated and desperate, frankly, for people in prison and just as importantly, their families on the outside. But, you know, the wireless market is much more competitive. The broadband market more generally, the wireless wire line when you include in that is not as competitive as we would like it to be, far more competitive than a prison phone situation. It's just we would look and say, yeah, you know, anything you can do to give people more choices with the right combination of public oversight measures and competition in the market is something that this FCC or any FCC has as its duty. You know, they're not just there to maximize competition. They're there to maximize the public interest and consumer welfare. And that's something that the outgoing chair didn't do enough for our taste. It's a piggyback on that point for me. I feel like when we're utilizing the metric of, you know, how can we generate the most possible amount of revenue given whatever the resources be it spectrum, be it the prison telephone industry, you know, it unfairly creates the situation in which people are going to be exploited. And I think what we have in the prison telephone industry and it also ignores other potential goods with the prison telephone industry, regular communication between families and prisoners breeds the kind of environment that supports reentry, which is a huge issue in our society. We have major, you know, major problems with recidivism in the US where we keep incarcerating and reincarcerating people, which telephones play a very vital role in mitigating that problem. But if the metric is, how can we maximize the most possible amount of money for a state or local budget, certainly that's gonna be lost. And I think when we think about the wireless industry, it's the same issue. Unlicensed spectrum for me, what I equated to is what I've seen in other circumstances in our history when there has been access to unlicensed airwaves. And Joe Torres from Free Press wrote a great book, News for All the People, and he was, he gives anecdotes of examples of where communities of color, African-American communities, Latinos, were some of the earliest adopters of radio, and they were able to do so in the early 1900s, you know, pre-World War I, because they had access to the unlicensed airwaves. So that's the potential we can see if our only metric isn't just, how can we make the most amount of money, the most bang for our buck given this one resource and start thinking about other potential social goods. Yeah, so when, I guess, similarly, I guess, you know, when Sasha drew that parallel, what I was thinking about was, you know, Steven had said that, you know, it seems so short-sighted for a state like Maryland, for example, to, you know, when you think about recidivism and other goals that we have with around prisons and, you know, to actually think that this is a moneymaker. You know, let's use our prison phones and these poor families as a bake sale, you know, to reduce, you know, maybe to offset a tiny bit of tax money and then end up spending a lot more tax money down the road because these families fall apart or there's, you know, or these mostly men in prison are isolated. And we have a similar thing, I think, around the spectrum policy when it seems so difficult to get to a, to have a good discussion about what is a balanced spectrum policy because we have certain, you know, I think mostly members of Congress who are thinking, oh, you know, this is a great way to get money to pay for something else, whether it's to pay for an interoperable public safety network, which at least is a good thing, or which is simply a way to get a short, a little short-term fiscal fix, a quick 10 billion on a completely one-time basis. There's only a fairly finite amount of spectrum left that can be cleared and auctioned at all. And to think that the imperative in deciding our telecommunications policy for the next half century is whether we can make a quick 10, 20, or 30 billion for the Treasury is just kind of nuts. We have to think about, even in economic terms, think about the, you know, the sector and how competitive it is and even, you know, even the tax revenue that will generate, you know, as an indirect consequence and not just the short-term fiscal fix of auctions. Say, at least most of the side of our customers are not in prison and can actually switch plans. So I think one of your, you know, kind of talking about it, I mean, certainly I think the wireless industry, you know, customers have had choices between different carriers and can switch plans. There have been, you know, contracts associated with going in. But I think that's, you know, that's where and one of the things that we're trying to do as, you know, a lot of the new initiative that we've got is how do you break exactly what you're talking about? So, you know, we have come forward with no contract plans. So we've gotten rid of the contracts that tie customers in so they can, you know, switch. They can come in, try us for some period of time. If they don't like it, they can easily switch to another carrier. We have separated the phone purchase from the carrier contract, from the, you know, service contract or service plan so that, you know, customers are not tied. They can, I mean, they can still, they can come in, get a phone and pay it off over time. They can pay it off, you know, upfront, but it's not that, you know, a direct tie to their, to their contract. So it makes it much easier for them to, you know, take their device, move to another carrier to do other things. So, you know, we're, you know, we're certainly taking steps to make sure that consumers do have choice and that they can, you know, do what they, what they feel best meets their needs. I don't have a lot to say in the prison situation, but that's the, you know, kind of our starting point going in and unfortunately in prisons, they don't really have the opportunity to do that. So, you know, anything we could do to try and, you know, move more towards that and having some choice would certainly make sense. So, as I said in my opening remarks, preserving competition is vital to economic growth, job creation, innovation, and enhancing consumer welfare. So when you don't have that competition when the market is dominated by two providers, then you're going to have these kind of competitive and consumer harms. And to Michael's point about the Spectrum Act, we've often looked at it that there's really two goals. It was one to raise revenue to create the public safety network, but it's also was important that they provided the commission authority to create competitive auctions and, you know, helped to restore a competitive wireless marketplace. So there's really two goals there. All right, let me ask a different question although before I do, I do the irony here of just this morning, if you follow my Twitter feed, I tweeted at T-Mobile trying to get someone to answer why I can't change my plan. I tried it on two operating systems and three web browsers and keep getting an error from the website. So if somebody could fix that to enable me to change my plan, that would be great. That's all right, we'll talk later. In the interim. So in order to get a little, maybe a little bit of daylight here, one of the proposals that we've been working on at the Open Technology Institute is the notion of building unlicensed GSM systems, which has profound implications in places where there's government surveillance and monitoring, but also a great opportunity for providing service in underserved or unserved areas here in the States. And so I'd be curious of folks take on the notion of, you know, why don't we have an unlicensed GSM or an unlicensed LTE band, something that would allow us to have devices, to bring our own devices to a truly unlicensed band to allow anyone to set up femto cells, Pico cells, small or even large scale cells to enable businesses to set up and offload traffic from their offices to the internet connection that many of them already have. What do folks think about this? Well, I guess I'll start. Our members, particularly our rural and regional members were some of the first to provide wireless access in very remote high cost areas, you know, at great risk and challenges and costs. So, and they were doing it with licensed spectrum. We view at the risk of upsetting the other side of this table, you know, we view unlicensed as a compliment and that it shouldn't be at the expense of licensed paired spectrum because I think it's proven that, at least with our members, they've really used that spectrum and put it to its best use. And I think one of the things, you know, I mean, an unlicensed GSM or network, I mean, there are billions of dollars spent every year by the carriers to build out infrastructure. So there's gotta be some, you know, that's a lot of upfront investment that goes into providing that. And I think one of the things that's made unlicensed very successful for its, the purpose it serves is that it's, you know, a user can go out by relatively low cost piece of equipment, set it up and, you know, use it pretty easily. It's a whole different model to, you know, be trying to provide service and, you know, the expectations around the quality of that service that go along with it. So, you know, I don't see it as a model that really translates an unlicensed model that translates into kind of a wide area coverage network that is made to serve, you know, a lot of people. But, you know, like Rebecca said, I mean, we also, we're very supportive of unlicensed spectrum. We do offload all of our devices, you know, have Wi-Fi built into them and we'll, you know, go into Wi-Fi and authorized Wi-Fi access point if it's available because we do look at that as a big part of shifting traffic. It should be done in a way that makes sense and, you know, we do, I think all of the projections on data growth and the, you know, kind of spectrum crunch numbers that you see out there, those are related to traffic on the wide area licensed network. We don't monitor, we don't know how much our customers actually use on the, you know, on unlicensed spectrum. So the studies really go to, you know, that growing demand on the wide area network and, you know, not tracking kind of what's going on the Wi-Fi network. So, you know, there's a real demand for more licensed spectrum. So we agree that, you know, unlicensed and Wi-Fi is, you know, is primarily a complement to the carrier networks and that's, you know, a lot of what I was talking about with Wi-Fi offload. But, you know, one thing I think Saucer's suggesting is where it could be a very beneficial, a particularly beneficial substitute of sorts is in areas that, you know, that are unserved or unserved if you think of Native American reservations, for example, in places where the licensed spectrum is often, you know, laying fellow because it's just not economic to build out. We released a paper a few years ago on the wireless redlining of rural America and 3G buildout precisely correlated, you know, with income levels, interstate highways, population density and, you know, you could predict exactly which counties, you know, would not have 3G or would be last to get it. And so that's why, you know, one thing that we think, you know, again, from a policy, a bigger policy perspective is a complementary proposal is that the, is what I call use it or share it. In other words, if these bands are being left vacant in certain areas, particularly in these rural areas, that other providers like WISP, these small, there's about 2,000 of these small wireless internet service providers or community networks or municipal or county networks that they should be able to use that spectrum at least, you know, short term, at least until the licensee actually builds out and lights up because spectrum is such a different resource than oil or timber, right? It's not finite. It's infinitely renewable from second to second, which means it doesn't harm anyone if you use even an exclusively licensed spectrum when they're not using it. And so that's part of the user shared idea is that you can lower the cost to and improve the quality of some build out even if it's only temporary to these areas. Yeah, I mean, I think Michael's point is precisely what I was gonna touch on, which is, you know, because a lot of the evaluation metrics are around, you know, investment and versus what we can get in return, and that's just smart business sense. We invest where we know we can get a return on what we're doing. You know, communities need to have the ability to build out their own infrastructure if some of the legacy institutions are unable to. So I think Michael touched on it perfectly, so I won't add too much. Yeah, a couple more, I mean, basically the same point there again, as I've heard from Michael many times, we're not usually talking about sharing highly utilized, you know, let's say cellular or PCS spectrum because that wouldn't make a lot of sense. That is actually a high traffic area. Usually we're talking about underutilized government bands that might be very important to a federal government operation for a few seconds a day or a few days a year, but largely lie fallow the rest of the time or in much of the country. That said, I mean, whether it's an unlicensed GSM network that is somehow separate from or a similar question, the idea of femto cells given to you, which is a name for you know, the wireless company basically gives you a booster that reuses their licensed spectrum in your neighborhood, in your house, versus having your own signal booster. You know, if one is okay, why is the other one not okay? And obviously there's some legitimate engineering and technical questions around that, but when it comes to making full use of the licensed spectrum in ways that benefit people, you know, we tend to think that there are probably too many restrictions placed on it by the largest carriers, but you know, those are ongoing proceedings at the FCC as well. I get the last thing I would add is that when it comes to unlicensed, generally speaking, versus licensed, yeah, we agree there needs to be a balance, but you know, what you often hear about unlicensed spectrum, and especially unlicensed spectrum in lower frequency bands is, well, who's gonna build that unlicensed GSM network? There's no business model for it, kind of like what Stephen was just saying, you know, the dollars don't always flow to these places. So in the past, that's what people said about Wi-Fi, right, these were junk spectrum bands, they weren't good for anything. Who's gonna build anything there? Okay, fine, we'll give them to you, you can play with them, but there's really no business case there. What we've seen, I think it's fair to say, in the Wi-Fi band with the revolution and explosion of uses there, is that, and Harold Feld has written about this at Public Knowledge, it's not necessarily the case that with unlicensed and with these open swaths of spectrum that you need to have, quote, the business model, or even, you know, the business model's plural, you can actually turn this stuff loose, open it up to innovators and entrepreneurs and communities, and say, here you go, you know, make with it what you will, and of course, that's not a guarantee for success, but oftentimes, if we sit here today and say, nobody can make use of this, and we try to predict the future in that way, we're gonna find ourselves, you know, laughing 10 years from now, or maybe crying, and saying, oh, we didn't predict correctly, we made a guess that this wasn't gonna work, and just by having the stuff available, we need that kind of test bed, that kind of experimentation that can go on in unlicensed spaces that really can't always go on, I wouldn't say never, but doesn't go on quite as freely in licensed spectrum. Please. So one of the challenges on, also on a kind of wide area unlicensed network, and even on kind of short-term user to lose it kind of proposals is that, Use it or share it. Share it, I'm sorry, use it or share it. Okay, so, but one of the things that you see, and I've seen it with, I've seen it with others that, you know, they come in, they wanna use unlicensed spectrum, and one of the great things is that it's available, it's freely available, anybody can use it. There's no cost to putting up, you know, to actually getting the spectrum. So they're happy to put their business in. Now, as soon as they've got a business, and they've got customers and they're serving people, they come in and somebody else wants to come in and use that spectrum, because it is kind of the Wild West, right? Anything can go, the experimentation can happen. But suddenly, now you've got an entity out there with some infrastructure that they've invested in, customers that are depending on them, and now they say, well, wait a minute, you can't let somebody else come in and interfere with my use. But that wasn't what the going in proposal was, right? It's kind of anybody can come in, you're unprotected, you're subject to interference, other users can come in and use that and do something else. But then, you know, you start to look for, for those same kinds of protections that a licensed user gets, you know, once you start to have an actual business and investment around that. And that's why the smart radio and database ideas that Michaels should probably speak to more than I for a couple seconds, but you know, where you have the ability to take those frequencies away potentially once it's built out as radios get smarter and as cognitive software developed radios, software defined radios become more the norm and not just a future looking thing, not just a play thing for a few. Let me jump in because I think that descends into an area that was probably too weedy even for us for this event. But let me also open this up now for questions. We have a gentleman back there, Andrew, with the microphone. And because pithiness is a joy to behold, please introduce yourself, ask a quick question, and be brief. So please raise your hands, we'll go right here. All right, Mike Sullivan, Wilkinson Barker. I was wondering, under the so-called unlicensed GSM option, how you could ensure things like Kalea compliance, roaming, et cetera. Do you want me to? Yeah, Kalea is a trouble for everything from Wi-Fi hotspots at your favorite cafe to community wireless networks. In this case, you're not an ISP and you're not an end user. And that opens up the question of if you reject this false assumption that Kalea's predicated on, if you must be one or the other, then Kalea doesn't map on to everyone's everyday reality when it comes to going down to your local Wi-Fi hotspot and using it. And the same conundrum would exist for this. But you're all in the Kalea gray area every time you use your favorite hotspot in your favorite cafe. And we did ask the FCC to clarify this. Maybe I should add that to the agenda of unfinished business, because they have not. Other questions, that's a great question. Other questions for the panel? Hi, I'm Cheryl Leanza. I work with the United Church of Christ and I look at a lot of these issues from a civil rights equity perspective and so obviously we've been discussing that a lot in prison phones. And I was just trying to inject into the conversation when we talk about the wireless future. We're looking at broadcasting some kind of path maybe to no longer be the distributor of content and wireless becoming the distributor of content. Historically, our equity conversation has always been about who owns broadcast stations, who gets to create content and put them out on broadcast stations and I think in the future we're gonna have this equity conversation in the wireless space. And so on one hand I'm really excited to hear our conversation about new competitors and small entrants and people coming in because I think that that is part of that equity competitive conversation. But I was just interested in particular for the two carrier reps to talk a little bit about how you would map sort of an equity conversation onto this competitive conversation that we've been having. Rebecca and Steve? Right, first. I have the fur to you. If I'm understanding your question correctly, you know, the certainly a wireless carrier doesn't wanna be just a dumb pipe. And many of our operators are innovating in ways that will allow them to provide content and other things over their networks. So I agree that we'll be talking about this in the future. I'm not sure, and we're almost there but it's a little bit beyond the scope at least from my perspective right now. So the question is, do you guys know the racial or ethnic makeup, et cetera, of your owners, of these? Owners of the network, so our carriers who are owning them. I know that we have, CCA in particular has a very diverse ownership base because of the nature of our expansive membership. We, our members cover 96% of the United States and so it looks, you know, and we have operators like Cricut and T-Mobile who are offering service in very low income areas. So it's very diverse, I don't have specific numbers. But to the extent that your question's about getting content out to people and having a, you know, diversity of content out there, I mean, I think that cellular networks actually do that, right, because there are, you know, with the data plans that are out there and the devices that are out there, they're increasingly open to, you know, any kind of app or content to be distributed. So there is a, you know, a good, I think, pipe and access to getting information out there, you know, at a relatively low cost so that there can be a diversity. And I'll just, I would agree with that to a point. And I think the difference between the internet and telecommunications models and broadcasting is that you no longer necessarily need to be the owner of the channel to put content out there. Doesn't hurt though. So the owner of the channel, if they don't want to be just a dumb pipe, can still put out their own content. We just need to make sure that all of our communications channels do stay open so that that app economy can keep flourishing and people have an ability to put out the content without owing the channel. I think underlying your question though too, is, you know, there's two kinds of equity here. There's social and racial equity and then there's also plain old financial equity. And so having ownership matters for those reasons too. But, you know, in theory, and I think in practice, we can have more people providing content with an internet model. We just have to make sure that it stays that way and that it actually is something available to all people and not just to the people who own the channels or the wires. Other questions from the in vivo audience as well as from the interwebs right back here. So hi, my name is Will Reinhardt. I'm from Tech Freedom. So we kind of started this conversation talking about HHI, which generally, you know, the DOJ has gone away from and a lot of antitrust scholars are very questionable considering it doesn't really actually deal with consumer welfare generally. And in the last, I don't know, probably 16 of the 16 reports from the wireless competition, it has actually detailed pretty extensively how prices have gone down. So I'm just wondering if the panelists would say that the wireless market actually is competitive or would you say it is not competitive? How do you actually describe the market as it is right now? I think in my opening statement, I talked a lot about how we, CCA doesn't think the market is competitive right now, not just from the metric of prices or HHI, but mostly from looking at the dominance of the largest two carriers and their aggregation of spectrum, which has really had a trickle down effect on all other metrics in the market. Once you control the spectrum, then you can really, as evidenced in the interoperability proceeding, you can then also control the device ecosystem and everything else. So our mission is to help restore a competitive marketplace for our members and the first step of that is helping them get access to spectrum. I think from our perspective, we would probably say it hasn't crossed that tipping point yet so that it is a competitive market, but that there is danger, right? I mean, and it is a lot of things that we talked about, making sure that there is spectrum available for competitive carriers, that there are devices available for competitive carriers, and so that we do have to be proactive to take steps to ensure that it is a competitive marketplace environment. Yeah, and I think it's not just looking at HHI, as you said, it's not just looking perhaps at the dominant market share and share an even larger share, actually, of revenue and profits that the two major carriers have. But it's also, if you look ahead, the signs we see when you think about 4G, and advanced LTE for this mobile device broadband world is that it's this access to the right spectrum because that's what Steve was talking about earlier. The fact is that unless we get the rules right for this last auction of spectrum below one gigahertz, the 600 megahertz band that we're anticipating through the incentive options, unless you get that right, what you really are gonna have a situation where only those two carriers have spectrum at frequencies that provide the propagation characteristics that have both coverage, and the combination of coverage and capacity that you need for these kind of advanced networks, because it's really only the low frequency spectrum that gives you the lower capital expenditure to begin with, the lower operating expenditure ongoing, and then finally the in building penetration because some people, I'm a T-Mobile customer and somebody next to me is on Verizon. Well, Verizon and AT&T got free legacy blocks of spectrum below one gigahertz, and so they get good in building penetration. Nobody else, no other carriers have that. And so anybody, whether a new market entrant or even any of these folks who are trying to expand their footprint, if they're foreclosed, because right now AT&T and Verizon have 80% of the low frequency spectrum, if they get 80% again of 600, game over. So that's why there is a very broad consumer and competitive carrier coalition on spectrum caps, and acting Chairwoman Clyburn needs to move the spectrum, the broader spectrum aggregation limit proceeding with a cap for spectrum below one gigahertz because we have to anticipate this last auction and these remaining auctions to come. I think for me, my own personal experience, I was a T-Mobile customer for a while. I live in New York now and travel the subway quite a bit, and so I switched to one of the other providers to be able to stay functional while I'm in the subway system. But I live in a place in New York where there's a ton of options, but I lived for 10 years in Minnesota, and a few years ago my brother came to visit me and he was on, he lives in Los Angeles, he was on Metro PCS, and for the two weeks that he was in town, his phone was just not functional. Now folks up here can probably explain to me why that happened, but I will tell you the real kind of lived experiences that his girlfriend was not too happy that he was not communicating with her for those two weeks. So I think in a lot of places in the U.S., there is a real lack of choice, and I think that lack of choice often happens to fall on folks living in rural communities and in some cases, communities of color who are, where companies are setting price points that are a little beyond their ability to be able to utilize those services. So. Yeah, not too much more. I would reject the notion that DOJ is moving away from HHI. I think we've all here said that it's not solely about HHI though, and so you do need to look at market performance and consumer conduct within that market, but HHI is still important as we saw in, you know, mergers over the last couple years that were either rejected or approved. Again too, I think, you know, prices are falling by some metrics, but if you're talking about per minute prices or per megabyte prices, that I would say too doesn't tell the whole story. So if your overall bill is higher and they want to say, well, look, you're getting better value because we're making you buy more megabytes, but it's a lower value, lower cost per megabyte. You know, again, people should have options across that entire range. It's kind of like the cable argument that look how much less you pay per channel. You say, well, I don't want 150 channels that I don't watch. And they say, no, no, you're going to buy them. It's trust us, it's more valuable. There's a lot more value there. If the overall bill is going up and if you're being offered or even being required to buy certain things to get other things, like unlimited voice to get a certain data plan, you know, I think prices are falling by some metrics, but usually it's a pretty cherry picked metric of prices per minute, prices per megabyte, things that don't really reflect what people are putting out from their pocket at the end of each and every month. Great, so we're going to take one final question from the audience and then return it to this panel to answer this question thusly, which is one concrete or as tangible as possible action item that would be a big win from Interim Chairman Clyburn in a tweet. Everyone's like, no, it cannot be done, but that's your challenge. That's why I'm giving you some time to think about it. One final question back there. My name is Galen Clemens. I just have a ticket back to a meta level and it's a sort of a tactical question. Given the composition of the FCC during the Interim Chairwoman's tenure, are there any of the various things that we've brought up today that would be better off brought during the Interim than under the potential composition when the two new nominees are brought in? Do you see any sort of in the public interest that you're better off putting them in there or maybe waiting on them? And for the carriers is, you know, same sort of question. I mean, at least for the issues that I've teed up, interoperability and spectrum aggregation, I personally don't think it matters. The record is complete. Whether you have three people or five people, they're supposed to be acting on the evidence that's in the record. And so for those two proceedings, the Interim Chairwoman Clyburn could act on those and should. And nothing particularly from my perspective. I think that the Rebecca said, in the cases are very strong on these issues or that the record is pretty strong on these issues. So, you know, there's a strong case to be made on positive action from a full commissioner or not. And I think, you know, even, you know, on this competitive issue of inputs to a competitive market, you know, DOJ was very clear in their filing in the competition report that, you know, all the inputs that we're talking about here of, you know, particularly spectrum, spectrum below one gigahertz, you know, access to devices are real, you know, critical inputs to a competitive market. Yeah, I think it's just too hard to predict because it depends so much on the individuals. I mean, there are some issues where, you know, you could predict Democrats and Republicans on the commission will tend to come out differently, but then, you know, it seems almost certain that they're going to pair a new Republican commissioner with confirmation of the new Democratic chairman. So that's a wash. And then on other issues, it really is individual. I mean, Commissioner McDowell has been one of the strongest supporters of unlicensed access to the TV white space, for example, as was, you know, Commissioner Baker, another Republican before him, very much in favor of unlicensed. So that's an issue where people are kind of in different places and it would be hard to predict, especially because we don't even know who the Republican will be. I think from my perspective with prison telephones, you know, the three commissioners that are currently left, including Clyburn, Pi, and Rosenwursel have been around for when they voted on the NPRM. So I feel like now is the time they've been part of the, you know, they've seen what's in the docket. You know, they're in a position to actually get something done and close this deal after 13 years. So I feel pretty good about that. Waiting until someone, new commissioners come into the FCC, I think would be difficult because then you're further delaying the process. You're talking about folks who are not as familiar with the issue and who would probably request a little more time to evaluate the issue a bit further. And we feel like, you know, we've waited too long. That might be Steven's tweet, too. I mean, get moving on his phone. Hashtag phone justice. Right. I mean, the two questions do kind of blend together in some ways. I think offsetting against whatever one thinks about the current commissioners and however progressive, conservative, whatever label you want to put on them, they may be. And maybe this would be a better time to strike on a certain issue. I think, as I pointed out before, I don't mean to dodge the question, but the interim tag is, I think, gonna offset that in some ways. So I'd probably prefer to see some things done now. I just don't know. And again, I'm not trying to dodge the responsibility or the question. I think it's incumbent upon all of us to push for good things to happen and not just to look at the interim chair phase as, you know, a waiting period. But I think for all the reasons people have listed, there's a lot of variables in play. I guess, you know, the tweet outtakes, I think Stephen's got prison phones covered. And in fact, we did a Twitter campaign over the weekend about it with them. What is interoperability? And just say, our understanding is it's in the wireless bureau's hands. So, you know, hey, WTV, make that recommendation and maybe the interim chair could act on that issue once the interference concerns have been, if not allayed for everybody at least, thoroughly vetted and thought through. And as Rebecca said earlier, and others said, you know, the record's complete on that too. So, get bureau moving and make a decision on interoperability in the lower 700 megahertz band. Do you wanna go down the line? Sure, why not? For me, I think it's simple. I think the chairwoman Clyburn should assign staff to dive into the docket. There's hundreds of comments in there. There's a ton of data that our side has been able to provide. Not so much. This, I will get it in tweet format. Assign staff, issue an order, hashtag phone justice. Right. Yeah, mine would be to go ahead and now and draft an order on the citizen's broadband service for the 3550 to 3700 megahertz band. It's not nearly as complex as the incentive auctions. But it's immensely important to take advantage of the momentum to negotiate with the military and other federal users now, because they're a little more receptive to sharing. And this is a platform, this is a foundational order. So you need to, you know, get that in place quickly. Y'all don't use Twitter too much, do you? Yeah. Oh, I broke it all, I broke it all. Go ahead. We can handle context here, it's all right. I'll say incentive auction with below one gigahertz cap. Is that okay for Twitter? Wow. And I don't use Twitter, so I, you know. That was good. And Matt sort of stole my tweet, but I'll just say it a different way, free the lower 700 megahertz spectrum. Well, so now we have two competing hashtags. Perfect, well thank you all and please join me in thanking this panel for all of their insight. Thanks everyone.