 strategic planning in the spectrum policy process. I know it's not news to this audience that strategic planning has become a more widely used tool for spectrum policy, both in the US and in other countries. And it's almost become like Moore's law with a lot more spectrum plans and planning efforts and planning groups every 18 months. It's almost exploding in terms of the amount of spectrum strategic planning that's been happening. This panel will focus on the success of these efforts, not just right now, but in the past, and how to improve the process of this strategic planning going forward, both for ongoing and future efforts. We have a panel, as you know, with very widely recognized experts in the spectrum field who have followed this issue for many years, in some cases decades, and have their own vantage point and unique views about these issues. They come to us as engineers, consultants, lawyers, policy makers, and industry advocates. I'm going to start with very brief introductions for each of them. Your bios are in your materials, so we're not gonna do extensive reading of bios here. And each panelist will have five minutes to give their presentation and overview about the strategic planning process. Each will take a slightly different perspective. And we're going to start with Chuck Jackson. He's gonna provide an overview and kind of historical piece that you wrote about how the process started and is going forward over time. He's a consulting engineer and a professor at GW towards Washington University. And I'll turn it over to Chuck. Okay, thank you, Michelle. I just preface this by saying that Pierre assigned us the topic of the promise and problems of strategic plans. And I'm afraid that everything I have to offer on this topic has been said by others before and they said it better. I'm gonna begin by coding one of those others. It's that, you know, plans are worthless, but planning is everything is a famous aphorism usually attributed to President Eisenhower. He used it in a speech, but when he used a speech, he attributed it to a statement he heard long ago in the Army. And he explained the meaning of it by saying, when an emergency arises, your pre-existing plans are usually useless. But if you haven't been planning, you can't start to work intelligently at least. That is, the reason it is so important to plan to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may one day have to be called on to solve or to help solve. And I think that staying steeped in the character of the problem is one of the greatest benefits of strategic planning at the FCC. An institution such as the FCC, the statutory mission remains unchanged for years or decades, but priorities change as technologies and markets and the membership of the commission changes. So I think commitment, true commitment to a five or 10 year strategic plan, it is an unrealizable ideal. But again, staying steeped in the process or in the problem is worth a lot. Similarly, there's some universals in the FCC process. One is it's organization day to day policy issues under the rulemaking process. Now, the rulemaking process has its virtues, but it's not always well suited for considering broad policy issues that cross many different technologies or services. And I think strategic planning provides a mechanism for analyzing such issues in a general context. I must tie down by a band plan on the needs of a specific industry on the outputs of the strategic planning of the plans themselves, but it's also very important that understanding and knowledge that the FCC get from that process. And I just as an aside, historical aside, I wanna note that a lot of our current policies, many of our important current policies came about because the FCC staff had been thinking hard about problems and new solutions. I think on license is a good example there. And it was the FCC staff, not industry, academia, or public interest activists that brought these policies into the debate and ultimately into play. But enough of that. One concluding thought that the Psalmist least in some translations had the last word to say on the planning, sorry. The plans of the diligent surely lead to abundance, but everyone who's hasty comes only to poverty. Pierre also asked us to prognosticate regarding the future regulatory issues and offer wide-mind views that are worth much and also note that Pierre didn't ask me to be polite so if you're offended, please be careful. One, opportunities to expect from use like cognitive radio, I think it's overhyped and overpromised, it'll be used, but I think that use and benefits will be relatively modest. I'm not going on a limb here. Various forms of cognitive radio systems using humans as a cognitive part have been around for a century, so saying that it's going to continue is not going on a limb. Two, the block of spectrum was made available in a legislation earlier this year for unlicensed use, up at five gigahertz will generate somewhere between 10 and 100 times more consumer benefits from only unlicensed use of TV white space. Three, spectrum efficiency will continue to increase. We know the promise of several technologies like MIMO interference calculation with multi-user detection, but we don't know what else needs to be, as yet to be invented, there'll probably be a lot. We'll continue to expand the range of frequencies that are going to be exploited. I could be wrong, but I think the vision of the low UHF frequencies is beachfront property will come to be seen as an acronym of one that was promoted in the early 21st century, mostly by lawyers, not engineers. And five, sort of a pessimistic view, the problem with the rising noise floor and the exploitable radio spectrum will continue to grow. Regulatory responses will be haphazard and effective. Negative impacts on consumers will be significant, but few will notice a complaint. Thank you, Jack. Next, we'll hear from Peter Tenguah, who many of you know is an attorney and currently serving as senior advisor at NTIA. He's had many high-level posts at the FCC as well, including serving as the director of the spectrum policy task force under Chairman Powell. How did this all get started? Well, I initially thought it traced back to a meeting that we held that was held in a chairman's office back in March, 2001. And you remember January, 2001, Chairman, Commissioner Powell became Chairman Powell. And these two guys in DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Department of Defense came over. One was Paul Kalanze, the other was, who was heading the program called the XG Year Next Generation. And the other was Tony Tether, who was a contractor for DARPA at the time, but under Nostasi, then it became, quickly became the head of DARPA. We've got an activist meeting, which was on this kind of dynamic spectrum utilization that had something to do with all the unused spectrum that these guys at DARPA were finding out there. This dynamic spectrum utilization, these guys are very innovative, they're saying this is the end of the need for allocations. Chairman Powell jumped on this opportunity and said, it doesn't matter which one, we need to hire these guys. One of these guys, lo and behold, we got Paul Kalanze, I give him all this. So I'd like to say that's really wanna get started, that it really dates back way before then, we can say, but back to maybe this report from 1966 on the silent crisis, the report on telecommunications science and federal government. But you can see my collection of reports. Some people collect stamps, coins, I collect stricter policy reports. But I got some of them in my bag. This is my favorite. And if you read this one from 1966, it does do a lot of the same things. And I wrote it when I was one years old. But when Chairman Powell took the reins, he wanted to lay out kind of his plan for running the commission. They outrun five specific areas to guide the agenda. One was broadband deployment, competition policy, spectrum policy, and reexamined of foundations and media regulation, and the fifth was homeland security. He said that this was a press conference he did in October, 2001. So he said, allocation policy is not keeping pace with relentless spectrum demands. Did we just hear that? It's not effectively moving spectrum to its highest investment in a timely manner. He said the central problem with the current approach, I guess we'd say today, is the command control scheme that requires government officials to determine the best use of spectrum and to constantly change the allocation table to accommodate new spectrum needs and new services. He identified that there were few incentives for using spectrum efficiently and outlined four principal objectives. And you can go back and look at this video or the press release we did around that time and suggest this commission actions. One of those commission actions he said we're gonna do is to establish partnership with DARPA. That was kind of the following year in 2002, we brought on Paul Colotsy from DARPA to run the new spectrum policy task force. He also mentioned using the technical advisory committee. So what else was going on back in 2001? We just put this in context. Commission and sunset in the CMR spectrum cap. There was next wave litigation going on. 3G, AWS negotiations were making and going on. There were making as well as 700 SDR rules and OES 9-11. So that would kind of put it all in context. So I'm not gonna go through all what happened in 2002 but this was the result. But I did go back, police and chairman can argue some of his previous statements and speeches and it's amazing how many of these same points about market oriented policies and the need for receiver performance did change. He's a speech he did back in February 2000, CTA. Oh, I know I'm out of time. I know this point out that this stuff is so going on and looking forward to talking about what LLets has learned from this particular teaching plan. I hope there'd be questions from the audience about what actually happened at the time. I can't tell you that. Mike Marcus is our next speaker. He has been a consulting engineer and advisor to many on a range of technical issues. He's also a former professor and a former high ranking policy maker at the FCC. Mike. Thank you very much. First month or two I was at the FCC, I got bored and I went down to the library and asked him a question. What happened when the FCC started in 1935? I went and woke up before there was FCC record. Where are the minutes of the first FCC meeting? And it was fascinating to me because, does anyone know the answer? First FCC meeting. First FCC meeting was trick questions in 1935. I guess trickle on how to get people confirmed. The very first after the FCC did was to set up three divisions, meaning basically subcommittees. But then at that time there were seven commissioners for seven year terms. And so the Reagan administration, there were seven commissioners for seven year terms. And the seven commissioners divided the cells up into three parallel subcommittees. One for radio, one for telephone, one for telegraph. This telegraph was a big thing in 1935. And so there were three many FCCs. Now as weird as it seems, FCC was descended apart from the interstate commerce commission and that's how the ICC always done things. Also in 1935 there was no initial procedure time. In 1935 industry was much simpler. Technological choices were much fewer. And the upper usable spectrum was probably around 100 megabits at that time. We live in a much more complicated world today. But we have an APA which came in after World War II was perhaps a reaction to the deal that makes decision making much, much more complicated results and courts appeals to everything. We have five commissioners for five year terms. So the average 10 year commissioners is a lot, lot less than it used to be in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And I frankly believe, as I said in my written paper, this commission does not want to have any strategy. The Telecom Policy Program in the University of Colorado with Dale Founder and Grant had a wonderful textbook that's now basically out of print that you can find and use copies around. And there's an article in there on models of decision making at FCC. And it talks about FCC having several models of decision making for different topics. I suspect part of the problem is that the model of decision making which is appropriate for broadcast ownership and content is used too much for spectrum policy making. And when you do broadcast ownership and content, you don't really want to have a strategy or long range plan. You act more like a court without decision making. And FCC has tried over the years to come up with a variety of policy statements. They've all lasted a year or two and then they disappear. Other major countries have only go expecting policy statements that they revise from time to time. I'm talking about the UK, Canada, Japan, and Australia have one goes, whether it's the best policies in the world, everybody knows what they are. They are revised. They have brought up to date as the leadership changes, as technology changes, FCC's as moderately comes up with a policy statement and then forgets what it would be a year or two. The problem is, technology does not move all by itself. Technology comes from people having ideas merging with investment capital that turns these ideas into prototypes that make sense and needs more investment capital and practical use. Qualcomm was able to get its key approval for its new technology in two years after it was incorporated in 1985. That type of decisive decision making plus signals from transparency to the investment community where they expect interest in telecom policy that frankly lacking, not under this condition, I want to criticize this commission being unusual, but basically for the past two decades, FCC doesn't have the attention span to come up with any policy and stick with it and that's having a bad effect on the investment community. Was the Spectra Policy Task Force policy the best one in the world? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But some policy that's put in place and has maintained an update and sends signals to investment communities of transparency and the investments in new communities of technology are not absolutely certain but are a lot more predictable than in the past. So I think of that, I would stop. Thank you, Mike. Next, we'll hear from Kathleen Hanan, who is the Vice President of the Federal Regulatory Affairs at T-Mobile and the former senior FCC policy maker including serving as Deputy Chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. Yeah, Wayne? Thank you, thank you, Chef. And I also was on the Spectra Policy Task Force with Peter many years ago, so. Well, I just thought I'd start out talking a little bit as the carrier on the panel about the Spectra Crunch and the title of my paper was really sort of rubber against the road, effectively. So I think policy planning and strategic plans are great but if you're out there and you're a carrier trying to contain and serve consumers and customers in the end of the day, results. And so I think all the good planning aside, I think the Spectra Crunch is very real and I wanted to cite a couple of statistics. It's really an amazing paper. I was just going to do a paper on it's entitled Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2011. It's a white, about 2011 to 2016, it's a white paper. And some of the statistics in here are just amazing so I wanted to cite a few of them just to put things in perspective here. So they predict that global mobile data traffic will increase 18 fold between 2011 and 2016. What does that translate into? 78% growth and reaching, and I don't even know what this is, but 10.8 exabytes per month, whatever an exabyte is by 2016. By the end of 2012, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth. So the mobile network connection speeds will increase nine fold by 2016. And two thirds of the world's mobile data will be video by 2016. So it's very real, it's happening, and Spectrum is really the life of what air the carriers breathe on behalf of our customers so it's a very important resource. And it's uniquely managed in the US by the government. I've been involved in Spectrum Policy for 20 odd years now and I think that there have been some high points that I'm just gonna touch upon and some of them are in my favor, but I do think at some point we're at, we have to sort of get to that point of actually deploying additional Spectrum in the market and I think some of that is happening as we speak in some of the ways that I think commissioners were so excited earlier. But I think some of the high points, I mean I view sort of modern wireless industry policy really coming out of the Spectrum auction for where it was granted in 1993. That was really a very revolutionary change in how we allocate a signed Spectrum and it's good things have come from it, T-Mobile came from it, so I think it was very positive for competition and very positive for consumers. The Spectrum Policy Task Force that Peter referenced, a lot of the drinks, hopefully more than just a binder of paper but some good things came out of that Spectrum Policy Task Force that actually, at the end of the day, are being implemented now. Things are on white spaces and so we're then recommended the Spectrum Policy Task Force. The National Broadband Plan is a great framework going for 500 megabits of Spectrum and then a lot of follow-on work that's happening with NTIA there. T-Mobile is very active on the Federal Spectrum end of that in terms of sharing the Federal Spectrum. We think that that's something that we want to explore. We want to test. It's a great concept. We actually, you know, it's sort of rubber meets the road. I think we're getting some little bit of voice back here. I think that we really want to see, should I stop? I'm not sure who's controlling me. I'm not sure who's controlling me. Okay, keep going, keep going, keep going. It's like when you listen to a phone call and you hear yourself speak, how disruptive that is. Sorry that that's broken. Thank you. So there's a lot of good work happening with NTIA on that too, and the most active and pushing some of those shared concepts that will be along with Verizon and others. We're gonna be very active on that. There were some good ideas along those lines in the PCAST report again. I just come from this from the perspective of sort of just practicality, you know, when you have an ongoing business and customers, and so for some of these are great ideas and they should be explored. But in the meantime, we need to run our businesses, we need to support our customers, we need to make sure they have the spectral resources and the networking abilities and the hands-on capabilities that serve them well. So looking forward to the incentive options, we see that as a big opportunity. The one thing that worries me about it is the complexity, you know, and let's be frank, those options are only gonna be successful if any broadcasters show up to, and so we really, really hope that as an industry we can be reaching out to those broadcasters who are interested to try to make them comfortable with the process and ensure that there's good participation in that auction. So just in conclusion, I think, again, we come from the perspective of a team mobile, a carrier that's been very, I think, progressive on-spectrum policy, very active on-spectrum policy. Spectrum is the lifeblood of our industry. It's important to competition, it's important to consumers. Good to have strategic plans, looking forward, we also need to think about the here and now and the companies that are trying to provide service now and making sure that there's sound spectrum policies supporting competition and supporting those services now. Thanks, Kathleen. And finally, we'll hear from Ellen Bidman, who is a law professor at Rutgers University at Information Policy Law. Thanks, Michelle. So in academia, some people call strategic plans a self-study, and in a way, this is a cop-out because if you call something a study, it means you don't have to be accountable for the goals. But in another way, I think the term self-study points to an underappreciated value of the planning process, which is that it can serve as sort of an institutional audit. It can help to socialize new concepts that are not ready for implementation, and I think the Spectrum Policy Task Force report before some of these functions, I'd be curious to hear from Peter and from Paula Wadsup, I think, who is here. What effect did the process of creating the report had on the agency, agency staff? But I can say from the outside that the strong endorsement of spectrum flexibility, the more tentative endorsement of the interference temperature were, I think were really important to the field. 10 years ago when that report came out, I didn't notice what was missing from it, and this is a strategic plan for the public interest. Now, one of the reasons I may not have noticed it was because I was an industry lawyer. Wasn't my job to look for that. But I think another reason is that that's just not where real public interest concerns were thought to lie, not the spectrum. They were in broadcasting cable, wired broadband. But now we know that spectrum's the whole ball of webs. Any value that we have in telecom policy is going to be found also in spectrum. So what do I mean by public interest values? Of course, spectrum efficiency is one of those public interest values. So some of what we call public interest values fit well in a model that focuses almost entirely on market efficiency and getting spectrum into the hands of carriers and other service providers. In order to have efficient spectrum markets, we will want competitions. A competition is both a public interest value and a market value. But other public interest values are distinct from the market discourse. And communications policy has always had space for those values. So we have talked about universal access, affordable and free service, reliability and safety, user empowerment, privacy. These are all terms that have in one way or another to make an appearance in telecom policy. And I think what we might call the broadcast era, there were relatively clear narratives about the value, the democratic value of access and distributed communicative capacity. I don't think the same thing can be said for these values in spectrum policy. And I think that's a problem. So, and I'll tell you why in a second. What really got me thinking about this was looking at the pending broadcast incentive auction. So here you have a situation where spectrum is being taken out of the band, maybe right of broadcasters show up to the auction, that is regulated in the public interest. And it's being auctioned for wireless. And I think most of us can agree that's a good thing that ought to happen. And for sure, no one is advocating anything like broadcast regulation in the wireless space. But the basic concerns with access, entry, distributed power and reliability and some other things have not changed. Those are still gonna be with us. Earlier this year, Congress passed the Spectrum Act authorizing these options. And public interest groups led by public knowledge. Thank you, Carol Feld. Did fabulous work in fighting for unlicensed spectrum in this band. They beat back the house provision that would have shut unlicensed operations out of the reallocated band. And I think if you look at that battle, you'll see that the arguments for unlicensed spectrum do deploy some of the traditional public interest language. What's good about unlicensed spectrum is that it supports access, portal service, innovation without permission, disruptive technologies, distributed control. So those are all familiar for public interest tropes. For understandable reasons, unlicensed advocates in that battle and typically sort of use a market-based language in which they are competing with licensed spectrum, licensees or licensed spectrum hopefuls over which approach fosters more economic value, more innovation. And I think this market-based vocabulary has its limits. Everyone's from innovation. But the narrative, this narrative of innovation doesn't necessarily sound in the kinds of justice themes that have mobilized policy passions in the past. And so this brings me to criticisms of the public interest discourse in Spectrum at least as we see it played out in the TV account. The first is just that the public is not sufficiently engaged. If you think back earlier this year to the SOPA and PIPA dramas, you saw with this groundswell of public opposition to legislation that might have blocked access to certain internet sites and services. And it's easier to see the public interest when you're talking about the content layer. It's just less wonky. It's easier for people to get their heads and their hands around. And so in that case, the copyright issue was translated into something that people could connect with freedom and democracy. And Spectrum issues aren't like that, but I think they should be and I think they could be. The second criticism I have is that the portfolio of public interventions that are considered I think is just too small. So, and I know Chuck mentioned this, there's some controversy even among unlicensed advocates as to whether unlicensed operation in the TV band is going to be productive. And in any case, the legislation imposes pretty severe limits on how much of the Spectrum can be used for unlicensed. So I think we ought to think, and it would be good to kind of put this into a strategic planning process, what are the other, first of all, this has been studied, what are the other bands that might be better for unlicensed? Where should the public interest energies lie? But also, what's the role of interoperability and standards, forgive me for the analogy, but in property law, they're not just public parks, there are easements and setbacks and building codes and zoning. There are lots of tools that you use to achieve public interest goals. In Spectrum, should we have sort of a comprehensive analysis of where license conditions are appropriate at the time that the FCC tried in the 700 megahertz band? We're entering, I'm almost done. We're entering the world of the Internet of Things when Spectrum, especially unlicensed, is gonna be, is being used to connect things to each other and to people. Does that change the analysis when we're not really talking about personal communications? What are the social implications? What does communications policy have to say about it? And so finally, I would just close by saying, you know, Spectrum policy is wonky and it's conducted by very few and probably most of them are in this room. And at one time, broadcast policy was the same way. And I think whatever you think of how broadcast policy was executed, it was a good thing that it came to be kind of socialized publicly as something that was important for democracy. And I think the same thing used to happen at Spectrum. Thank you very much, Ellen. It won't surprise you to hear that the panelists today were very eager to respond to each other's papers and have a few minutes left to do that. So I'll just open it up to the panelists before I open it up to the floor for comments and questions. Mike, do you want to start or others, Peter? Chad? Well, I'll just respond to something that Ellen said about public interest engagement. And it seems to me, we corresponded a little bit on this. And it seems to me one thing I see lacking in that community is sort of an in-depth technical analysis capability and they take their technical analysis from people I'd like to listen to rather than being able to do much of an in-house. And I think that limits their understanding. Is one who is personally responsible for getting a huge amount of Spectrum against the unlicensed category. People expect me to be the unlicensed greatest chair leader. And I'm very enthusiastic about unlicensed, but where I disagree slightly with Ellen is the issue is not unlicensed because SCC in the 80s tried several approaches on license and where the ISN ban, what became Wi-Fi and Bluetooth was phenomenally successful beyond our fondest dreams. Unlicensed PCS and UNII were dismal failures. In your term, unlicensed PCS was a permanent dismal failure. UNII got better when they changed rules. And the problem was that UPCS and UNII were unlicensed but had very, very detailed technical rules whereas the ISN ban had virtually no technical rules. And when, I would like to say that in 1985 I envisioned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth again. But we wrote, we had faith in deregulation, we had faith in creativity and we wrote rules broad enough that when the idea came, not only was the Spectrum the technical flexibility was there, whereas the people who wrote the rules for UPCS and UNII, consults in with industry. Industry wanted those things. Industry did not want the ISN ban, by the way they hated the idea. They industry evoked in the FCC rules very, very detailed rules and as the world evolved those rules were out of touch with the reality. So the key thing is not just unlicensed Spectrum, it's unlicensed Spectrum with technical flexibility. And I think the reason why we saw this great success in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a variety of other things in those bands, is the technical flexibility so that unlicensed by itself, if you put too many technical regulations on unlicensed, you may do that unlicensed VCS is stated. Well, one comment I would have as opposed to some of the things that Peter said, but it's just, I think, you know, we're sort of on this knee curve of innovation right now. And it's, I think the challenge for government is just, when Peter pulls out a report from 1966 and then another one, you know, I think, and some of the same things were said in 1966 that are said in 2012, that doesn't make me particularly feel good actually. It just, you know, it takes too long, you know, for some of these policies to actually come to be. And I don't know what the answer is to it, but I just think the marketplace, the innovation that's happening in the market shouldn't be held back, you know, the policies just can't seem to get ahead of everything. So I think, you know, maybe a little more leaving it to the marketplace is an order to make that happen, but that's not true. Let me give you an example. We're at the lack of plans for the next act. Allocation is now 3,275 caterers. Great, or other than anyone could possibly build a commercial one. At the Beijing Olympics, there was an operational 120 gigahertz system. That is immediately in the United States. If I tried to sell one tomorrow, I would have to go in the Julie and I would have to file a decision for rulemaking for service rules. There are no service rules about 95 gigahertz. There are absolutely no guidance in FCC of what they would do for service rules between 95 and 275 gigahertz. And while one would not expect large opposition, if I was a VC trying to decide what to fund, there are huge uncertainties. This is a big, you know, there's no, not even the slightest hint of what the US spectra policy would be for service rules of 95 gigahertz. And that vacuum discourages investment. It discourages capital formation and discourages American innovation. The Japanese people built that 20 gigahertz system for the Beijing Olympics and had guidance from their government. The US high-tech industry does not have guidance. And I frankly think that part of the issue is that the FCC, as it's been run for the past 20 or 30 years, just isn't interested in long-term things. It's interested in adjudicating things that come in its door. Occasionally we see spectrum policies, but, you know, like with Michael Powell and Lester Dyson, they get the spectrum policy task force, report those to the trash can. And what I would like to see is maybe something less specific, but which is maintained is both technology changes and the use of the FCC changes, but at least you see the outline of spectrum policy on a large, large basis. Yeah. What Chuck said about engineers in the public interest groups, it would be great if someone wanted to endow these groups to hire more engineers. And I remember being, it might even have been in Boulder five years ago when people were talking about what should the FCC look like. And a couple people said they should have more engineers. They should have more engineers on the A4, fewer lawyers. And I wondered if that were true, Michael, do you think that the FCC would, I mean, what you're talking about is the FCC should take initiative to do the rulemaking or the service rules and not wait for a petition, not just act responsibly to petitions. Is that what you're saying? If you think engineers would change the population of engineers? I don't think it's necessary. Sometimes you have to do initiatives. We did what became Wi-Fi Bluetooth. We did our own, what became 16-year-olds. We did our own. The key thing is sending a signal out there. It doesn't have to be a rulemaking. There is no spectrum policy statement in the U.S., except the spectrum policy task list, but everybody knows that doesn't mean that's no longer relevant. It's applicable to the question here. Imagine yourself standing in Silicon Valley with a pile of money and someone comes to the door and they want to use it for some 120-year-old spectrum thing, but the next guy comes to the door and wants to use it for a new computer display. I think he can give us the computer display guy because the computer display guy doesn't have to deal with FCC and get involved in a multi-year rulemaking. And I'm afraid the U.S. wireless technology base, not the carriers, because carriers revive anyone in the world, but the technology base is sliding down because of this lack of credible U.S. policy doesn't tell them where to invest in, and whether you like M2Z or don't like M2Z, that should not have taken four and a half years to resolve. They should have perhaps made, they should have had a signal in advance, but even though they didn't have a signal in advance, it should not have taken four and a half years to resolve that. The technical issues and the non-technical issues were not so complex. The FCC dealt with the AT&T T-Mobile merger in one year, they dealt with the NBC Comcast merger in one year. I don't think that the M2Z issue in AWS 3 was any more complex. I'm sure it did generate more thousands of pages of comments than NBC Comcast or AT&T T-Mobile. FCC has to encourage investment by being transparent and resolving things in a reasonable schedule. Chuck, I think I want to hear from you. Just one response to the observation by Mike. The FCC is a political institution with various kinds of accountability, and one way to say no, very politely, is to say we're studying that issue, we'll get that. And so, if they take four and a half years to resolve an issue, maybe that should have been a hand to M2Z, that they should have pulled a plug three and a half years earlier. Let me list, pick up some of everybody's points. So, let me get some piling on Ellen, let me pile on that as well, and show you one of mine. I got a plan. I got a plan. Prospects for U.S. sector management by going to New Orleans in June 2002, they beat us by two months, right? Don't see public interest mentioned here. I told you. Right, right. But, her paper does raise an interesting point in the sense that you typically think about spectrum policy as being very non-partisan, until very recently, and I think it's been because of these organizations taking various sides, and I hope we can maybe dispose of that on board, because this is, I think, we got a statement when the spectrum policy desk force issued its first public notice back in June of 2002. It was very bipartisan. We got it. We have a separate statement from Commissioner Cops and Commissioner Martin, you know, opposing this effort. So, and that's typically the way it is, but I think the reading between the lines of some of Ellen's things is that if there can be that, you know, accusing this among, you know, various folks on, because I think the answer on the unlicensed or exclusive use, the answer to yes. And a lot of things in between, too. So, a lot of experimentation going on. In response to Chuck's paper and all his predictions, I predicted some will happen and some will not. I was going to premise my question. Look, 10 Williams only had 400, and I'm not as good as he is. All right. Predictions are hard, especially when it comes to the future. You'll be better. You'll be better. You'll be better. You'll be better. Come on. On Mike about decision making at the FCC, being on the floor, you know, the bruises you get from that, it's not just in spectrum. I mean, it's in everything. So that's an institutional issue that, you know, maybe doesn't necessarily revolve around the spectrum, but generally about the commission and their ability to make decisions. And in regard to the shelf life of these kinds of strategic plans, what they call them, a policy statement, a task force report, or whatever they get to be, they obviously, they do have a short shelf life, and they tend to be about the same as the chairman in charge, but there's a reason for these, and I think they're serving a very good reason, and it would be really for policy leaders to do this, you know, like their first year. Because it provides the community with some guidance kind of what their priorities are, what their priorities aren't. Like I said, we had, you know, chairing power people with five priorities, you know, guess what, spectrum policy was always really number five. And then when the report came out, you know, we got briefed on it, he's really excited about it, I had this cheer. You're number three. You're number three. We could never, you know, obviously go ahead, broadband and online security, but at least, you know, we got the top five most of the time, but really most of the real work is done at Hock, right, band by band, service by service, and that has continuity. When commissioner Powell and chairman Powell, he and Harry did a lot of really good stuff that Bill Pinar and Dale Atkins started, and he was a commissioner, software defined radio, cultural wide band, 3G, all of that stuff started secondary markets, removal of the spectrum graph, all of that started in a 1999-2000 timeframe, you know, and another thing Bill Pinar outlined in that speech in, I think, 2000, was this concept called decided auctions, which I've been always going on, and it said, this is what we should do to help clear the broadcasters out of channeled the 60-69. Great idea. It was in the Specter Policy Task Force Report too. 10 years later, hey, it's implemented a law. That's great. It does have, you know, it does keep on going if you stick with it, and so, but I think policy leaders are generally just like Ad Hockery, being reactive, right? TM, by the way, Ad Hockery, I'm afraid, marked out, but you have to have both. And the Ad Hock's band-by-band service-by-service approach, if guided by the old principles, you know, some kind of policy statement like this, at least during the term of that leadership, you know, makes sense. The new administration comes in, new chairman comes in, things may change. Priorities are going to shift, you know that. The least you know during that time where the priorities are, what the ideas are. As some of those ideas have life and will continue on, I can name a whole list of those. TV White Spaces, for example. So, who else did I pick on? Kathleen. Right. Um, thank you for your service on the spectrum. And same with Mike, and Mike too, and everybody else who's involved. I think the most important page in this whole task force is the first page that lists all the participants. And the best thing about it was, it was interdisciplinary, and that's the way to solve problems, to identify the problems and have it interdisciplinary, or across all the organizations involved. That's all. Yeah, thanks Peter. Let me try to distill just a little tighter exactly what specific lessons might have been learned from some of these strategic plans. So, if a group takes off next year, coming up with the next and greatest strategic plan for spectrum policy, what should they take away from these past efforts? Are there specific lessons, or even one each that you'd like us to take? I'll start with something which you, for example, talk about the public interest goals for, or is there another takeaway that you would suggest? Well, yeah, you know I think that's it. Okay, okay. All right. I was gonna say, yeah, no, I think a good strategic plan also has to have a work plan that follows up, yeah. It really does have to, it's great to kind of set these great ideas out there, but then there really does need to be some follow-up and ensure that some of that happens. I do think spectrum policy tends to be bipartisan and in our areas we disagree politically, but I think there's a lot of common thinking, a lot of commonality, really drive, and should drive over administration from administration to administration or FCC chairman, D.I.A., and to provide some continuity and certainty, I think, for the industry, I think is important to do that. So those are two things I think, just sort of providing that sort of concrete work plan, okay, what's the follow-up? And some follow-up through even subsequent administrations, even if it's to say, you know, I didn't agree with that last chairman, I want to do something else, but sometimes these reports do gather dust on a shelf and what's the follow-up that's what I've been saying, it's really important. I agree, all right, but she stole my answer on that. I'm sorry. Implementation, because that was my role is when we got done with this system a minute and that was very difficult. I think that it would have been helpful because we had a little concern about some of the commissioners early on. I think it would have been helpful to go out with the policies to get, you know, in for moderate, may have had a lot of it, may have lasted longer. But what we did instead is when we started receiving school makings, you know, notice of being a quarry, stuff like that, right off the bat, I think the remember 2002 is when the report came out, December 2002 was when receiver, you know, the white spaces I think really got kicked off. Some other things about rural areas, things like that. And so that's the key, I think also to have a plan but just get it going right away as well. Another key lesson learned I think and which was a benefit was transparency and involvement of the, you know, we had several rounds of comments for these two rounds of comments, bunch of open workshops. And so we had, you know, nobody could play the process card, I wasn't involved, I didn't have a voice. You know, so it was a very well-balanced in the chapter I think we did today with those workshops too. And then, you know, so, and also it'd be problem oriented, you know, I think we learned to focus first on identifying what that problem is. And, you know, and that problem was spectrum access, not spectrum scarcity. And we were able to focus on those problems and where the problem and the causes was another lesson learned. And obviously, the way we're learning lessons is from your mistakes. And I will take the blame for all those mistakes that I'm not talking about, what they are. I think the most important thing is that you not only need a plan, you have to have a process for updating it because what's happened is that plans come up, they last one year, two years, and then there's a big gap. I think it's important for the wireless, for wireless, there's a high tech industry in these continued investment and R&D. And if you don't send the signals of whatever the current plan is, it's a stifles, you know, I mean, I disagree strongly with what Chuck said there. The government, worthy of its people, does not script people along for four years and then say, you should have got the message. For corporate mergers, Wall Street insisted that FCC resolve them in one year. FCC has a policy statement, we will resolve corporate mergers, it says six months, but it's sort of a rubber band, time span, it really translates into one year, right? It's evolved into one year, right? It's, okay, it says six months, but it's a rubber band, so. But the problem, consistently, FCC resolves corporate mergers in one year, even though the statement says six months, but there should be an ongoing policy statement and as personnel change, as policies change, as administration change, and technology changes, like in the other major countries, that policy statement should evolve, but that's part of transparency and the US government pushes all our trading partners to have transparency regulation. You know, what's good for the goose is good for the candor. We should have the same type of transparency and spectrum policy that we urge upon our trading partners. Extracting, thoughts on less than fucking? Well, I mean, I hear what Mike is saying about the commission and how it should be a philosopher king and all that, but I think you have to look at the incentives of American institutions and structure of our government, and many of the nations he talks about have parliamentary systems where, in some sense, the spectrum of plan is made by the minister of ruling party, I did some spectrum consulting in New Zealand, and that was a real education on how different institutions matter. New Zealand has a parliamentary system with a unicameral legislation, which means if the party power decides they want to do something, it's gonna be done. You know, there's no debate. It just, the vote is, and if you don't vote along with any of the parties, so unless it's a confidence vote, it's gonna be whatever the minister decides, and that's a really different world we have in the United States, where you've got independent power and a House and Senate Commerce Committee and commissioners of different parties, and so I think hoping for that kind of behavior in the American institution may be reaching a little far. That's the other, it's a rulemaking, right? I mean, so maybe what you're saying is more spectrum- They each generate 20,000 pages of comments, and FCC can deal with those 20,000 pages of comments to make an answer, you know? That's only... I'm putting the master in FCC. They need some help. Let me move on to adding one thought of my own in terms of lessons learned. Having worked at both NTIA and the FCC, it seems to me that there ought to be a way to reconcile the two very disparate roles with the two agencies, and that's been hard to do because they each have their own strategic planning process. They work together well, but it's become more difficult as each grapples with their own spectrum needs and their own constituencies. So certainly, if I were to take a lesson away from past efforts, I would try really to bond the two and come up with some joint activities and efforts to try to help them work together, to try to really wrestle with some of those types of spectrum-crunch issues that are becoming even more critical every day. Let me open it up with that to the audience for questions, and I'll keep asking my guests. But, Jim Snyder from my solo and again, Jay Sock, from Center for Ethics and Heart of the Future. My question is to the two people on the panel that this list of agencies and academic affiliations, and this is one that you don't get by. Many major medical schools say require their faculty to disclose any kind of interest they have in the field, such as the Department of Social Security and their campus-like dentistry, whether they're right or wrong. This is clearly not part of the culture of the College of Ethics and Faculty of Education. Every third of a telecom faculty acknowledges either the written or their oral presentations by any conflict of interest. For example, you are well-known to have a whole strain of financial interest ties a lot of them currently, too. Could you just articulate briefly what are your major consulting relationships? I've been consulting much in this space for the last couple of years, but I've consulted for a variety of firms in the industry, broadcast stations, cable companies, wireless service providers, CTIA. I'd say in the last decade, my clients attended to me, wireless service providers such as Verizon, wireless, CTIA, and some manufacturers. So I think it's relevant when you type up the license section of the TV bands for the audience and the press and whatnot to have that context. So Ellen, I have a slightly different question. That's right for you. You don't want to know about my... I'm more interested in Rutgers Law School. What policies do they have for faculty? In particular, do they have any penalties if any would, in fact, they get out there and don't disclose relationships? What are the policies in your space? That's nothing I know of. Yeah, okay. Other questions? And we're going to use the mic up front, so please come up or signal with your hand. Yes, Jamal Watkins, Chief of Staff at the Center for Social Inclusion. The question I have is centered around the issue of public interest. I hear this notion of transparency thrown around that, oh, there's comments made and the FCC can respond to them, but under the now second term administration, this notion of transparency actually includes collaboration as well as participation, not just individuals making comments. And so the question I have around the policy creation as it relates to community benefits and community scale, either things being community-led, community-based and owned, is where has the policy developments over the last 20 years either succeeded and or failed at really being transparent and accountable in terms of collaborating with communities that are traditionally not served, i.e. rural communities or underserved urban communities? I hold heartily that transparency, whatever the policy priority is, whether it's a rural community, urban, technical, it's all about the group's decisions. So you don't, and obviously the opposite of collusion is don't take it to court, correct? And so you have to have those opportunities to, but what are the policy priorities of a state administration or FCC? Those need to be articulated and figure out who are my key groups that I have to get input from and how best can I do that? Is it field hearings? Is it using the web? And all of that, without a doubt, improves decision making. At the same time, if you can't figure out what interference means, you can't solve issues in rural areas or urban areas. If you can't figure out how to allocate a band of spectrum from one use to another in less than 12 years, all communities are suffering from that. So, but I think it's important to reach out to those communities and figure out exactly how and why. I think Commissioner Rosenhorst made a couple of really good examples of like in a hurricane situation where consumers need to be empowered, where they can't be if their batters are dying. So I think it's a very good question, thanks. Good, can I have to talk a little longer? We've talked a lot about unlicensed today, and I don't want to talk about the current disputes, but if you go back, the FCC staff was considering this issue more about 78, 79, to 85, before you doubted the rules, and at that time they were opposed by industry, and the public interest community was nowhere to be seen. Now, both the industry and the industry, public interest and community supports it after it's all already a complete success, but there was a situation where I would argue that unlicensed has delivered great value to people with limited income, some people in rural areas, more urban areas, but I don't see how they could have engaged very well in that debate, and it would have been good if, I think the organized public interest groups could have at that time, but it wasn't the kind of thing they were interested in, and when you have an issue like that, it's sort of abstract enormous benefit in a decade or two, how would you get, and this isn't just one particular, it's anybody in the lay community, how do you get them involved, and how do you get reasonable participation? I think it's done easier than it was. I mean, just with the technology, so I can actually go back to the FCC, the only way you can know what was going on at the FCC is you sent a paralegal up there to copy a bunch of documents, and we're lucky enough to have a law firm in town doing work for you, you actually knew what was going on, and now there's a lot more transparency, and I think it's a lot easier than the average citizen to really track what's going on at the FCC as those policy makers who do the internet business that I love to do with them, so. I would like to say the spectrum of people, frankly, don't know much about North America, and I know my wife's in the energy business, the University of Colorado's neighbor, the Colorado School of Monage, used to have a sponsored energy program to invite policy makers from Washington out to rural America to see what the energy business looked like in rural America, to see what mining looked like, see what oil treatment went and looked like, and it's a crap, it's always surprised me that in the communications industry, their FCC basically has had no travel money the whole 25 years I worked there. There is a need, I think, for FCC and probably NTA employees to get out to rural Americans, so it's out there, that there's a way that rural America, how much could it cost to invite federal employees out to North Dakota in the middle of the summer, but when my wife was in the energy business, she got to meet rural America and see how the energy issues were affecting them. At FCC and NTIA, the policy makers and the spectrum, which has to be of the techiest, the lawyers have very good kind of with rural America, I think programs like what the Colorado School of Mines got in the energy business would be a good idea to bridge the gap so that there's better understanding. I'm proud to say that what we did in the ISM band did create the wireless ISP industry, we didn't anticipate it, but it did and the wireless ISP industry, indeed, did have a good impact in rural America, so that was an unexpected impact, but again, if you were flexible enough, you could have surprising impacts by adding that to the wireless ISP industry, which now has a pretty significant impact and is one of the major impacts in lobbying the FCC for unlicensed spectrum. You have a question? Yeah, not so much a question, Matt Larson with Westport with the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association. You get a message from rural America, I read that. Fixed wireless operation uses unlicensed spectrum in rural areas of Western Nebraska, and Northeast Colorado. There's two to 3,000 other operators like me around the US delivering service to somewhere like two and three million subscribers that we're providing an alternative to DSL cable and both wireless, so I think it's a great illustration of the use and utility of unlicensed spectrum and a couple of things I'm interested to hear that he has talked about, one of them, and I'm talking about, John was talking about engaging and really the bold carriers should be engaging with more unlicensed spectrum or network and state and anybody else, simply because at this point smartphones are already about 50% of total traffic over unlicensed spectrum through Wi-Fi, tablets is around 95%, that represents somewhere around a $40 to $50 billion investment in cell sites if you're gonna build out the cell sites to deliver that. So cell phone kind of mobile providers are actually getting a huge benefit of unlicensed spectrum. And then last thing I wanna address something from Helen's paper, she said that unlicensed has a little bit of a brand new problem, I think that there's not enough push for it, so henceforth I wanna start calling it Freedom Specter. It's not called Freedom Specter. It's not called Freedom Specter. Freedom, Freedom Specter, it's like Freedom Rock, Freedom. It's like Freedom. Speech, no. Any questions? Let me ask you a quick question about the international and the global side of this issue. I know we have the work process with respect to strategic planning on that global scale. Any of you that have been involved in that process, would you say it's improved over the years as it becomes an adopted for strategic planning principles? I know Peter and I spoke a little bit about this before the conference. Yeah, Michelle, what's interesting I think is that other countries and regions of the world, especially in the communication policy generally, and spectrum policy, have kind of become the laboratories that employers would be called just as brand-nice in the case of New State Islands versus Lincoln, right, remember that? State or laboratories, it's not countries or regions. And so we see all these countries, especially in Europe, experimenting and improving with each other on, you know, basically the progressive policy angle. And it was actually in the UK, with Professor Martin Cave, on behalf of the Extract Early Exchange Treasury, who started a review in the UK, and it was an independent review, which I had a lot that inspired the spectrum policy test. I followed up with that within a lot of the Ministry of Defense uses spectrum, and other countries followed, just like the US followed New Zealand in optioning spectrum. So, it's important to keep an eye and learn from what those other countries are doing. Whether it has to be in the ITV is another matter, you know, of the end of this acronym, more bilateral and independent basis, and then maybe take the lessons learned from successes in those experiments, those laboratories, and take them to the, I do so that the developing countries of the world who rely on the ITV can then pick up on this, the benefits of the lessons learned in this other country. Got a good question. I wanted to comment, there's an interesting internal FCC budgeting issue of the International Bureau of Control for International Travel. If you want to go to truly obscure ITUR meeting, you can probably get travel money to go to it. If you want to go to New Zealand or UK to see, to learn from the foreign policy lessons, almost never get travel money for that. There's a prioritization of travel money. ITU is super, super priority for whatever few dollars they have for international travel, and any get smart travel, even to keep it in a few percent of the FCC budget is almost impossible to get. So unfortunately, FCC is not learning as much, I agree fully of laboratories in other countries, but it doesn't get well into the FCC budget process. We have about three minutes left, so I'll ask all the panelists to give me their thoughts about any future predictions or the next big spectrum debate that you see forthcoming. Let's start on the other end with Ellen, if you've got any thoughts, one goes last. Out on a limb and save the incentive options. That merger of the metro. Now, I can actually think that if there was enough spectrum out there, I think, and wireless networks are getting so good, I think as we get to LTE and Dan's and LTE and whatever comes next, that I really think and mobile broadband is really gonna come of age, and I think as we move more into the tablet space and laptops are already coming obsolete, I think mobility is the strap, and I do think that we can just get our spectrum unleashed and get these networks built, I think that they will be in the competition and then to the wireless side. Chuck, you are the author of one. Yes, Peter, did the other thoughts on the next big spectrum debate? Well, I wanna build off your comment about the disparate roles of NTA, and I'm interested to see, I've only been to NTA a few months, so I don't have a grasp of everything, but I do predict that the two roles are very complementary, and I think the two communities, including the federal and non-federal, are right now engaged in some discussion about sharing access to some of the bands like 1755, 1850, and 1850, but this is not, I mean, this collaboration has been going on for a while, I mean, one of the initial things that FCC did right after the spectrum policy test was, revised, like a 60-year-old memorandum of understanding with the Department of Commerce and NTA to basically put in place a very good working relationship. We did the ultra-wideband rules in collaboration, 3G, 1780, and 1850, which Mike was involved in. So, I mean, I think that, and then I think the benefit or my prediction would be the benefits of this kind of cross-pollinization that's going on at the industry level and the federal level that's going on in these working groups under the Commerce Director of Management and Budget Committee are gonna really, gonna be positive in the long-term benefits where the federal side gets to start benefiting from a lot of the innovation on the non-federal side and actually vice versa, a lot of innovation going on in the non-federal side. Thanks, Mike. Two quick things. One is understanding the interview with everything in NTIA works very well. I would urge you to read section five of the P-CAS report, which makes some incremental, everyone's so upset about P-CAS because of the cellular industries, part about other part of it, nobody's written section five. Read section five, there are major issues in NTIA that need to change. Section five was a good incremental approach. Given the election, I think there's a good chance those will be implemented. And the other thing I urge you to read is Commissioner Pye's very first speech at Carnegie Mellon a few months ago. We recall section seven, the Step Shadow of the Communications Act. If we're to get innovative technology, we have to do something about section seven. I think the text that was adopted in the early 80s is irrational. We either have to repeal it or we have to come up with a framework that works. Could you remind everybody? Section seven says it's small city in the United States to be favorite with new technology. I don't think that's a bad idea, but then it goes on to make some statements like things ought to be approved in one year. One year is irrational and what's supposed to be done in one year is, but section seven reform is desperately needed. Commissioner Pye chose that as the subject of his very first public address. And I hope that that will be an important issue in the next year to stimulate R&D and innovative technology so that the characters can use it. Thanks, Mike. Thanks to all the panelists. Thank you.