 new to my role at the FCC, but I am not actually new to spectrum policy discussions. As some of you may know, I come to the agency having spent some time in the private sector, in the trenches as commission staff, and up on Capitol Hill. So I count myself among the fortunate who remember the efforts of the spectrum policy task force a decade ago. Their insights into our wireless future were ahead of their time. So I'm also aware that shaping the next decade in spectrum policy is a daunting task, but it also has a lot of opportunity in it. So let's start with what we know. Let's start with some obvious things. We know that wireless services are revolutionizing the way we live. We know that wireless services are also revolutionizing the way we work. We know that the number of smart devices on our airwaves is increasing at breathtaking speed. But we need to think beyond what we know right now. Because what we face is more than the explosion of wireless phones and tablet computers. Because within the next ten years, machine to machine devices communicating wirelessly may number as high as 50 billion. The much-vaunted internet of things is around the bend, and the ways we connect, communicate, and conduct our commerce will never be the same. So the numbers telling this story may be familiar, but I think they're so impressive they bear repeating. Already, we have more wireless phones in this country than there are people. Roughly half of these are smartphones, and they generate 35 times the traffic, traditional wireless phones. Tablet computers, of course, generate 121 times the traffic. And last year, mobile data traffic in the United States skyrocketed 300%. And then last year, U.S. networks operated on average at 80% of total capacity. That's the highest utilization rate in the world. So in the simplest terms, the demand for our airwaves is going up, while the supply of the encumbered spectrum is going down. The pressure is on. This is when we innovate. Innovation is going to take a variety of forms. It will take technology from developments in smart antennas to frequency agile radios to advanced database services that facilitate dynamic spectrum access. And it will take topology, including changes in the ways the networks are deployed, especially through the big promise of increased use of small cells. And it also will take creative spectrum policy responses. We're in the early stages of one of those that are undoubtedly familiar with it, incentive options. So I want to start with that today. And then I want to follow up with some new ideas about federal spectrum, tower and facility sighting, and public safety. First, incentive options. For the only two decades, the commission's pathbreaking spectrum options have led the world. The agency has held more than 80 auctions. It has issued more than 36,000 licenses. And it has raised more than $50 billion to the United States Treasury. Not too shabby. The commission's simultaneous multiple round ascending auctions have been a model for governments and commercial wireless providers across the globe. We are now, again, poised to be the world's pioneer. We have an opportunity to show how a new kind of auction, incentive auctions, can facilitate the smart and efficient use of wireless resources. Now to be sure, hard work, big choices lie ahead. And the agency September 28th, notice of proposed rulemaking, is just a start. We are going to need broad input, including from the people in this room. But for my part, I believe there are four central building blocks for incentive auctions. Simplicity, fairness, balance, and public safety. Now simplicity is key. Incentive auctions are undeniably complicated. But in every structural juncture, a bias toward simplicity is crucial. Simplicity will yield more interest in the opportunities these auctions provide for broadcasters. And in turn, this will yield more spectrum. In short, to have converts to a crusade for more wireless opportunity, simplicity must be our incentive auction gospel. Fairness is also essential. This is especially true with regard to the treatment of broadcasters not participating in the auction. Fairness demands that we consider how to accomplish repacking, minimizing unnecessary destruction. At the same time, we are going to ask broadcasters that they make a fair assessment of the opportunities that this auction provides. By offering incentives to share channels and incentives to relocate from the UHF to the VHF band, this auction can mean new resources for broadcasters to develop new programming and deploy new services. Let us also be creative here and consider how this process can yield new models for station ownership, new funding sources for local content, and new ways to use technology to make efficient use of our airways. Balance is necessary. None of the three legs of the incentive auction. The reverse auction, the repacking, or the forward auction can stand on its own. They require balance. For instance, the interference rules we consider will not only impact broadcast services, but also how much spectrum will be available for auction, which in turn will impact the revenues raised. Balance is also going to require attention to licensed and unlicensed use of spectrum across all frequency bands. The former provides reliability and interference protection. The latter provides low barriers to entry and promotes the efficient use of limited resources. I believe that good spectrum policy requires both. Finally, public safety is fundamental. We have to remember that in the middle class tax relief and job creation act, incentive auctions are part and parcel with enhancing public safety. The auction revenues the commission raises are designated to support the first nationwide interoperable wireless broadband network for public safety and we can't forget that the success of these auctions requires that we need this funding objective. And to all of this I will add that speed matters. The commission should put all of our auctions on a timeline. We have to move at the pace of digital age wireless demand. Second, I want to talk about federal spectrum. Now federal authorities have substantial spectrum assignments and after all, critical missions throughout the government are dependent on access to our airwaves. Federal authorities use their spectrum assignments to protect us from attack, tools like early missile warning systems. They use them to manage our air traffic, to enhance our crop productivity, and to monitor our water supplies. To protect us against forest fires and to predict weather patterns and awareness of climate events like hurricane Sandy before they occur. So they are essential to our economic security and our national well-being. Nonetheless, we are on a hunt for new opportunities for commercial spectrum in order to reach that 500 megahertz benchmark for new wireless broadband use in the executive order from President Obama just two years ago. Now we're already on our way. We've got incentive auctions on the horizon. We have on deck traditional auctions of up to 65 megahertz of spectrum courtesy of the middle class tax relief and job creation act. And in recent weeks, we cleared the way for wireless broadband use of up to 30 mega hertz in the WCS band. Likewise, we are looking into more flexible use of 40 megahertz in the 2 gigahertz band currently assigned to mobile satellite service. Plus secondary market transactions will continue to be an important part of our overall effort with spectrum to use for wireless broadband. Being this mark is going to require more. So the search is on for ways to take a fresh look at federal uses. On the one hand, we have calls for the traditional process of repurposing federal spectrum. Historically, there were three essential steps clear, relocate, and auction. But this three part command that has worked so well in the past may work less well going forward. Just as in the commercial sector, more government functions than ever before are traveling over our airwaves and it is growing harder to find spectrum for federal relocation. So on the other hand, we have calls for large scale sharing of federal spectrum resources, which we see in the recent report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. This is an exercise in innovative thinking and its success depends on the development of database systems that are not yet in existence. So over the long haul I think both courses are worth pursuing. But in the near term we're going to need a new approach, one that will facilitate federal repurposing better than our old three step process while leading to faster access than the current prospects for large scale sharing. I think it's time to develop a series of incentives to serve as a catalyst for us to identify more spectrum for relocation. Now government agencies are mission focused. Once a communications network has been built, once a land mobile radio system is operational agencies don't want to change it because it disrupts their mission. This is completely rational. But what if we were to financially reward federal authorities for efficient use of their spectrum resource? What if they were able to reclaim a portion of their revenue from the subsequent re-option of their airwaves? Would they make new choices about their missions and the resources they need to accomplish them? I think so. I also believe that this idea is exploring because it is entirely consistent with the idea of synthetic currency proposed by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Moreover this is timely. Agencies across the government face funding shortfalls as Congress addresses the Lumain sequestration deadline. In this context instead of talking about a crunch maybe we should try a spectral cliff. There may be no better enticement than the possibility of revenue from a spectrum option to help alleviate the pain of impending budget cuts. Now many of you have worked in government and no first hand the power of incentives for federal organizations. We have to find ways to change the federal spectrum conversation. We must work with our government partners so they can realize the value of their spectrum and the value of using it efficiently instead of only seeing loss from its reallocation. Third I want to talk about tower and facility sighting. This is important because no amount of spectrum would result in more and better wireless services without sufficient infrastructure. So let's start again with what we know. Wireless facilities make wireless broadband possible. This supports local economic growth. The statistics actually demonstrate this pretty clearly. Studies show that delivering broadband to a community would increase its per capita income by nearly 4%. In short communities with more robust coverage from wireless services are better equipped to compete. So if we want economic growth we have to avoid the unnecessary delays in the state and local approval process. Now on this front I think we are already making some progress. Most recently President Obama issued an executive order that established a multi-agency working group tasked with unlining access to the 30% of land in the United States that is controlled by the federal government. More consistent policies on federal lands and federal roads should simplify and speed the deployment process. And then earlier this year Congress moved to ease the burdens of infrastructure deployment with section 6409 of the middle class tax relief and job creation. This law actually requires the creation of a master contract for applications to land federal property. It also relieves some of the regulatory burden for co-location if modifications to a tower do not alter its physical dimensions. Finally the commission has taken steps to speed the tower setting process by adopting 90 day and 150 day shot clocks for local government. However we need to acknowledge that last month largely as a matter of administrative law the Supreme Court decided to review the commission's tower setting order. So these are good so far but I actually think it's time for a different and updated approach. We need to tie these disparate efforts together in a single whole. The commission should start proceeding to craft its own model rules for facility setting for state and local governments. This model should be off the rack and easy for state and local governments to use. For starters it should harmonize President Obama's executive order, the developments in section 6409 of the middle class tax relief and job creation Act and then the shot clocks that we already have in our books. We can ask our intergovernmental advisory committee for input too. But above all we need to make it simple because the range of new deployments from towers to co-locations to small cells is growing more complex and the demands on state and local jurisdictions navigating these new technologies are growing. By streamlining the process we can provide a way forward for state and local governments looking to oversee new deployments within their borders. A way that respects their authority but it lets us also offer them this. Follow these streamlined model rules and investment in your community will increase, service will expand and your economies will grow and if we do it right what we will have is a more predictable set of laws all across the country. Fourth and finally I want to talk about public safety. It was just two weeks ago when Hurricane Sandy wreaked its havoc in the northeast. Now here in Washington we were spared the vulnerable storm but the pictures of flooding further north, the devastation of the shore fires at water's edge and implausible snowdrifts west are hard to forget. All communities washed out dark from lack of power and cold without feet. In some locations normal returns fast and others it will take longer and normal may never be the same. So many of our first responders are 911 operators and communications companies made herculean efforts to keep us safe and connected before, during and after the storm so we owe them our gratitude. But the commission also owes the public an honest accounting of the resiliency of our nation for the hurricane. Now improvements came as roads cleared as cellular on wheels rolled in and fuel was made available for others. Moreover wireless companies collaborated making their networks available to one another for their customers without additional charge. Still we are now a nation where over one third of households rely strictly on wireless phones. Our digital lives are downloaded onto our smartphones when the unthinkable occurs we are more vulnerable. By choosing wireless and IP networks we are choosing to go without the independent electrical source that traditionally powered copper plant. I don't believe we have to sacrifice safety in the process. So it's time for an honest conversation about network reliability and the wireless age. It's time to ask our questions about backup power and how to make our networks more dependable when we need them most. This does not have to be a carbon copy of the backup power rule the commission sought to adopt after Hurricane Katrina. The office management and budget clearly disallowed that. But this does require a comprehensive discussion that includes questions about access to fuel, priority under the Stafford Act, communications deployments for backup, maintaining backhaul, and harmonization with state and local authorities. The time we are at this conversation is right now. Before we have another rash of headlines like we just saw, post sandy wireless outages add insult to injury, and sandy exposes gaps in wireless system during emergency. We need to make progress before the next storm hits, the next disaster devastates, and the next network related outage leaves us vulnerable again. Finally there's another component to this discussion and that's consumers. We migrate so much of our lives to our wireless devices premised on the idea that they are always on. But storm events like this can take the most connected among us and turn us into wireless T-totalers. Even last week we had hordes of New York residents roaming the streets looking for places to plug in and charge. So we need to also talk about consumers preparing for the next event with longer lasting backup batteries, solar chargers, and more. So there you have it. Ten years ahead is daunting, but our charge for the immediate future is clear. We need to move faster. We need to make incentive options work. We need to build incentives into thinking about federal spectrum. We need to provide streamlined models for tower sighting to spur facilities deployment. And we need to have an honest conversation about the resiliency and reliability of our networks in the wireless and digital age. Now we're already on the right course. We are the world's leading economy when it comes to wireless services. We have nearly 70% of the world's LTE subscribers right here at home. More than 80% of the world's smartphones run on operating systems from US companies. And we can be proud that our wireless economy already generates nearly 200 billion annually and supports directly or indirectly 3.8 million jobs. But if there is one constant in the digital age, it is that disruptive forces are always on the horizon. Wireless data demands are multiplying. Machine to machine devices are growing exponentially. Maintaining our global leadership position is going to take creative thinking, smart execution and spectrum policy that is flexible and dynamic. So we need good ideas from the people in this room, from silicon flat irons from interests across the country. So that 10 years hence we have a wireless sector that drives digital age innovation, spurs job creation and grows the US economy. I look forward to working with you all to make it happen. Thank you.