 All right, well, we may as well get started. Welcome to New America. I am Michael Calibri's. I direct the wireless feature project here, which is part of New America's Open Technology Institute. And of course, we're about all things wireless and particularly about a focus on more ubiquitous, fast, and affordable connectivity to everyone. And these days, rural America is a particular challenge. So today we have a very diverse and hands-on group of experts to discuss one of our greatest policy challenges as well as a potential solution, which is spectrum as infrastructure connecting rural America. The rural broadband gap remains stubbornly wide despite billions of dollars spent in recent years through subsidy programs like the Connect America Fund to the large ISPs. More than 15 million Americans in rural and tribal areas still lack access to fixed broadband that is home broadband without data caps. That meet the 25 down and 3 megabits per second up speeds that the FCC has established as the minimum definition of adequate broadband service. This rural broadband gap puts millions of families at a severe disadvantage, both economically and socially, as you'll be hearing more about. In February, President Trump called the lack of high-speed broadband to 39% of rural Americans and to 25% of our K-12 schools an intolerable situation. And Kelsey Geiselman is here, and I'm sure she'll be speaking more about that from the administration's perspective. Similarly, FCC Chairman Pi has long emphasized rural broadband as a leading policy priority of his. And having grown up in Parsons, Kansas, he's personally very familiar with the problem. So the question for us is, what is the most cost-effective way for the FCC to boost rural broadband and how? So as I'm sure you all know, fiber is very costly in low-density areas. So there's a growing recognition that fixed wireless access, so-called wireless fiber, can provide broadband at high capacity, 100 megabits downlink or more, or over long distances to remote locations at a fraction of the cost of trenching fiber. Even in more spread-out suburban, ex-urban areas, something like a fifth or less of the cost. And that's why we even see some of the big players, for example, Verizon, recently announced a plan to quadruple its Fios footprint, not with wireline fiber, but with fixed wireless broadband using the 28 gigahertz millimeter wave spectrum that they've been acquiring and the rest of which will be auctioned this fall. But again, that'll just be in fairly dense suburban areas because at a certain point, using that high frequency spectrum becomes uneconomical as well. So I think one hypothesis that we have here at New America is that the most promising federal investment in infrastructure for rural broadband may be the allocation of unused spectrum for shared use by rural wireless internet providers, as well as by schools, libraries, and any entity willing to make use of it and deploy. So this would be an infrastructure subsidy available to any operator, any institution, any co-op, with no direct cost to taxpayers. Allocating adequate spectrum to rural broadband requires no government spending, per se. Yet it would lower the cost for every internet provider and for millions of consumers. And I think particularly when we move to our panel, you'll hear about how the right policy choices at the FCC can unlock currently unused spectrum that, taken together, can provide a powerful toolkit for rural internet providers. It's vital that this toolkit includes spectrum with different propagation characteristics, just the way the mobile carriers need the same thing. So that is low-band spectrum, like TV, white space, mid-band spectrum, such as a citizen's broadband service spectrum, and high-band frequencies, as I just mentioned. And together, this can permit deployments in very localized areas if we have the right policies. And I think the ones you'll, the sort of proceedings that are in play right now that could provide this spectrum as infrastructure for not only for rural areas, but for basically less densely populated areas in general. And add competition as well in the suburbs is the TV white space, that is the vacant TV channels, where there continues to be regulatory uncertainty, despite the commissions adopting that years ago. The citizen's band radio service at 3550 to 3,700 megahertz. There's a debate currently underway about the size of the licensing areas for the half of that band that will be auctioned and licensed, so-called priority access licenses. Then there's a band that's a much bigger band that sits immediately above that, 3,700 to 4,200, which is currently used by satellite companies and earth stations, thousands of earth stations for video distribution. It's how cable head ends get the programming, such as Saturday Night Live. It's live in South Dakota, even, because it's bouncing off a satellite to these dishes. But these dishes have claimed historically to block off all 500 megahertz, even though they're using just a fraction of that space. And so a question then becomes, could we use the rest, the unused spectrum, without disturbing them for rural broadband? And then finally, even the high millimeter wave spectrum, the commission 18 months ago allocated a huge new swath at very high frequencies in the 60 gigahertz range for unlicensed use. And new types of Wi-Fi that are very high capacity are springing up there. And they can also be part of this toolkit. So with all that as setting the scene, we'll move on to, we have three speakers at the top, and then a panel to discuss these issues a little more interactively. And we'll start with Whitney Kimball Co, who is the director of national programs for the Center for Rural Strategies and also coordinates the National Rural Assembly, a movement made up of activities and partnerships that are aimed at building better policy and more opportunities for rural American general. And she'll give us a kind of an overview of the problem and its impacts. Whitney? Thank you all. It's good to be with you today. Thank you, Michael, for inviting me to New America and to be part of this conversation. My name's Whitney. I am the director of national programs for Center for Rural Strategies. Rural Strategies has been around since 2001. We are located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which is kind of the heartland of coal country. I don't work in that office. I work for my hometown of Athens, Tennessee, which is about a population of about 13,000 people. And it's just near where Dolly Parton lives, which I'm very proud of. And it's about 60 miles from the Gig City, which is Chattanooga, of course. So regularly, I'm faced with the actual experience of what it means to not have a fast, affordable connection when I see my colleagues in counterparts in Chattanooga or in Knoxville, 60 miles the other way up the road, having this really necessary infrastructure. I was gonna tell a story. I mean, I don't wanna preach to the choir, but just in case, I feel like we ought to go ahead and start making the case again for why it matters that rural is connected and what value we place on rural communities. The other night, I was doing homework with my daughter and her teacher had assigned her a project where she was supposed to connect sounds to emotions. What does joy sound like? What does sadness sound like? Those kinds of things. And my husband and I were sitting around with her thinking about that. And my husband being the tech wonk that he is, said, you know what disconnection sounds like? It sounds like dial up. And you know what loneliness sounds like? It sounds like that ticking clock while you're waiting for the video to buffer. And then so we started riffing on this. And then I was thinking, you know what hopelessness sounds like? It sounds like that elevator music that you have to listen to when you call up your cable company and you're like, my broadband's not working and they put you on hold only to come back an hour later and tell you it was a squirrel that chewed through the line. Or it was your next door neighbor who went with a different provider and they jacked up the whole system. And then an hour later, you're still hopelessly kind of waiting to build your email blast that you need to send out for your nonprofit because the broadband keeps buffering. So we spent a little time riffing on that. She didn't turn that into her teacher but that's something that we noted among ourselves. So the National Rural Assembly is an organization or a coalition that I get to coordinate. And it is made up of rural practitioners and leaders from across the country, people who live in every state, who work in every sector, people who have chosen to live in rural America because they feel connected to it somehow. But they all struggle in some shape, form or fashion with broadband connection. So when Chattanooga was about to flip the switch in 2009 or 2008 that would ignite their future as the Gig City, I was in Washington DC with the National Rural Assembly for convening where we were talking about the challenges and opportunities that rural communities are facing right now and they range from healthcare access to quality education, to affordable and quality housing. All of these issues cropped up and we started talking about what is it gonna take to make a change along those lines and broadband was the theme that just ran through all of those pieces. If we're going to build a more dignified life for all people in all the places, broadband has got to be part of that effort. So we formed the Rural Broadband Policy Group out of that meeting. And immediately we sat down and we wrote down some principles that kind of explain why we think rural America matters to the future of this country and if you're gonna have a conversation about broadband these are the things, this is the place from which you should start. So number one is the idea that communication is a human right, that it's, in fact it's a necessity and that broadband is in itself infrastructure that supports human communication. So that's number one. Number two is that rural America is diverse. We tend to write off rural America, I think, as a monolith of white, perhaps angry voters and that's not necessarily the case. Rural America is 20% of our population. It represents all kinds of racial backgrounds, experiences and cultures. Rural America is only 14% different in terms of diversity from urban America which is not a lot and the trend is that we're gonna be an even more diverse place just like urban America will be in the future. So given our diversity and the diverse needs of our community, all broadband infrastructure should take into account the diversity and the needs and what's appropriate technology for those communities. So that's number two, rural America is diverse and we have diverse needs. Number three is this idea of local ownership and investment. That local ownership and community buy-in and investment should be a priority no matter what kind of infrastructure is built because the more buy-in there is, of course, the more support there will be for a vibrant economy and vibrant lives. So local ownership and investments number three. Number four and this is it and then I'll move on. Net neutrality, network neutrality and open access is vital. As my colleague Adele Casparalta who worked for Public Knowledge at one time said, don't break the internet before rural gets it. We're already in slow lanes so we need to be on the watch for ways to make it more open and make net neutrality a reality. So those are four big principles that we set down and crafted. A couple of weeks ago I reread an article by Sharon Strover who is a technology and policy researcher and you should look it up. There's this really incredible article I think that was put out in January of 2018 in the online magazine called The Conversation and it outlines exactly what challenges we're facing in terms of bringing broadband, fast affordable broadband to rural communities. She notes the 39% who are not connected. She notes the homework gap in the schools and our children who are not connected. She gives some ideas around what will work and how we can deploy better broadband but at the very end of the article she makes this turn and she says fundamentally though it's about values. Do we believe that all the people in all the places matter? Do we believe that leaving behind 39% of people, leaving them out of the economy, out of our democracy, out of participation in our society is good for the rest of the country. In the 1930s and 1940s we didn't believe that. We decided everybody was important and we electrified the nation. So I feel like in a lot of ways we're in the same boat at this moment where we have to re-articulate for ourselves why rural America deserves a more robust broadband system and broadband connection and we have to remind ourselves why everyone matters, why it shouldn't matter what zip code you live in. So I'm really excited to be part of this panel today because this is a conversation about that gets to the heart of some of those principles I outlined. What's the appropriate technology? How do we move this forward? How do we connect all the people in all the places? So thank you for having me. If there is any, I wanna twist people's arms but yeah if you, if there's any questions for Whitney about the rural situation, she's our expert here on this. The 39% keeps coming up and we know there's been deployments with fiber and other types of technologies. Where are we really today? Is that still at high or has it changed? The 2016 broadband report is the one that I'm pulling that number from and I believe that is still, but still resonates if it's not 39%, it's not much less than that. And it's even higher I should point out in tribal lands. That report also stated that 68% of people who live in rural tribal lands are without access. It also stated that 41% of our schools, rural and urban are not connected which represents 47% of our student body. Just a quick question. Are some of the numbers you are mentioning and some of the four points, the principles, are they on your website? They are. If you go to ruralassembly.org and go to rural broadband working group, I think it's the first link there, it's the list of principles. Thank you all. All right, thank you Whitney. So next up we have Kelsey Geiselman who I think most of you know or are aware of. Kelsey is the Telecom and Technology Policy Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Her portfolio includes broadband spectrum and other telecom issues. Previously Kelsey served as Communications and Technology Council to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and other things that I won't mention. And I should recall I'm gonna do short intros of course because you have a bio sheet, so Kelsey. Thank you Michael and thank you for having me here today. Connecting rural America is undoubtedly one of the administration's key priorities. As Michael said in his intro remarks, the President commented that the lack of broadband access in rural America is intolerable. And I think that's something that has echoed across a lot of the actions that the administration has considered and taken in the past 18 months or so, 15 months I guess. As Whitney outlined, access to robust, high speed broadband access service is such a critical part of participation in democracy, the economy and society today. There are so many things that are enabled by broadband access. It's no longer about email or Netflix or surfing the web. It's about things like having a vibrant business opportunity, being, having a productive farming community. Things like that that were not necessarily contemplated 10, 15 years ago but are such a critical element for being a really, truly part of our economy today. Connectivity can create new jobs, will keep people in our vibrant rural communities and provide access to critical services like healthcare, education, job training and other things that are going to help improve opportunities and the potential for rural Americans. To address this problem and close the digital divide, I think there are really two key areas of focus. Investment and innovation. I'll go into both of these in more detail but at a high level, we need to make a better business case for investment in these expensive, hard to serve parts of the country. This includes reducing barriers to entry, both regulatory and other. This also means filling in the gaps in areas where there may never be a business case. We also need to get innovative with deployment. While fiber is often considered the gold standard for connectivity, it isn't the only solution and it may not be the best option for deployment everywhere. With improvements in technology, it's possible to achieve this high speed access with wireless technologies. By taking a tech neutral and performance based approach, where appropriate, we can reach full connectivity much sooner. So what are we doing to fill this gap? Shortly after Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue was sworn in, the president signed an executive order that established a task force, tasked with looking at how to improve recommendations for improving life in rural America. The interagency task force was comprised of 22 different agencies that looked at a whole host of challenges in rural America. During the process, they had listening sessions, working groups, stakeholder engagement, and other conversations about how to improve rural prosperity. I got to take part in a lot of these conversations and the most interesting thing to me was that representatives from all of these agencies kept coming back to one thing, the need for better connectivity, whether the Housing and Urban Development Department, whether Department of Justice, HHS, all of these different organizations that you don't necessarily associate with broadband kept emphasizing how important it was for any of their mission-critical activities to have everyone connected. All of the other recommendations that came out of this working group hinged on the basic principle that everyone needed the capacity to get online. One of the recommendations that came out of the report was for executive leadership, for promoting connectivity. In response to this, we at OSTP, along with the National Economic Council, the Office of American Innovation, NTIA, and others are working with an interagency group to promote rural broadband deployment. The group is comprised of multiple agencies that have various interests and equities in broadband deployment, including funding, infrastructure permitting, or other infrastructure management assignments. Some of the goals of the group are to coordinate the funding streams that are already available, to leverage existing assets, to streamline the permitting process, and to otherwise make it easier, faster, and less expensive to deploy broadband everywhere in the country, but particularly in rural America. The president has also taken executive action to promote deployment. In January, he signed an executive order directing GSA to revise their common forms. The common forms were part of the middle class tax relief act of 2012 and intended to streamline the process for siting on federally managed or owned property. However, the common forms never quite got to the point of being perfect and useful. In response to some of the concerns, this executive order directs GSA to evaluate the current use of the forms, solicit feedback on how to improve the forms, and make changes in order to reflect this data. By streamlining the application process, we can reduce one significant resource challenge. Instead of devoting dollars to compliance, we can focus more on the actual physical infrastructure deployment. The president also signed a presidential memorandum in January directing Department of Interior to increase access to tower facilities and other infrastructure assets. Leveraging existing infrastructure assets will help to more quickly build out networks and minimize costs to providers. Taking advantage of infrastructure that's already in place makes sense. These model lease terms that will come out of this presidential memorandum will give providers certainty around the process of engaging with DOI and encourage public-private partnerships that will expand the footprint quickly of networks. All of these changes are intended to improve the economics of deploying broadband in rural America. However, we're realistic about the fact that there's still situations where there may not be a business case, even with these changes, and that's where the federal subsidies come in. First, we're looking at existing federal funding. There's multiple agency sources for broadband deployment, adoption, access, and equipment. These agencies range from the ones you think of immediately like FCC, NTIA, USDA, but also include agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Housing and Urban Development Department. The administration also sent a comprehensive infrastructure proposal to Congress this year with dedicated funding for rural infrastructure. While there are not dollars specifically allocated to broadband funding, states have the opportunity to make decisions about what infrastructure is most appropriate for their constituents. And in many cases, we think this will include broadband. So the second piece of the conversation around rural connectivity is innovation. There are certainly benefits again to increased fiber deployment. The capacity and future-proof capabilities of fiber are important considerations, particularly as we talk about some of the uses of broadband networks. However, there's no denying how costly and difficult it is to deploy fiber to every home, particularly in very rural parts of the country where there are many miles between homes or in extremely geographically difficult places. It's almost untenable for this option to come to fruition. Because of this, it's important to consider all of the options for connecting rural America. Fixed wireless broadband can often be deployed more quickly and less expensively and provide functional and high-speed access for many people. With rapidly improving capabilities as well as fixed wireless, as well as satellite and other wireless delivery methods, they are important pieces for solving this puzzle. To that end, it's important that standards and definitions for broadband look at performance rather than solely focus on transmission technology. Capacity, speed, latency, these are all important for the modern digital economy. The principle should be technology-neutral, service-focused, so that broadband deployment can be fast and widespread. This gets us to the question of how to use Spectrum. While I won't opine on how an independent agency should rule on proceedings, it is, I think, universally accepted that Spectrum is scarce and valuable at this point. And policy decisions about how to allocate and use Spectrum have prompted a lot of debate. This is where it becomes even more important to look at creative methods for spectrum management. There are a lot of opportunities, as Michael pointed out, for more efficient and effective use of Spectrum that is either unused or underused. These are important conversations to be having, and I think it's great that we're having this panel today, to look at ways to better connect rural America through a variety of different options. Today's conversation is really important to the future of rural broadband. We're continually seeking solutions to the digital divide as someone who grew up in central Michigan and who went on vacation during the summers to Lake Michigan to a town served by a fixed wireless provider. I know that it's a great source of trying to connect rural America. It's clear that we will need to work together with industry and with government and other stakeholders and that creative and forward-looking efforts are going to be required for reaching some of the hardest to serve areas. This is a challenge that we have eagerly taken on within the administration, and we look forward to working together with all of you and hearing your ideas to connect citizens and realize the potential of all Americans. Thank you. See if there's any questions? Yeah, sure. Yeah, any questions for Kelsey? And please make sure you tell us who you are and who you're with. Tegra, we're a consulting firm working in this space. I might have missed it, but you didn't mention, I don't think you mentioned anything about the Universal Service Fund. I was referring to in the sort of existing federal funding. We all pay into it, it's about $8 billion a year. And it's a question of, isn't that a possibility to reprioritize some of that? And some of the, it's already being used to subsidize co-ops, phone co-ops in various parts of the country, rural areas. So it seems like a natural focus. Sure, I think it's, and as I said, I think it's really important to look at existing federal funding streams and opportunities that are in place currently and how to make them work together, how we can coordinate them to be most effective and reflective of the current technology. Question right now. This might be more one directed for Secretary Perdue, but since you're here, there was a pilot, a $600 million pilot program. A bunch of our folks are kind of interested in that. When is that gonna roll out and the details for how that program through our US will be deployed? Sure, so as you said, as part of the omnibus, $600 million for a pilot program for broadband funding was allocated for USDA. I am not certain what the timeline is. I would defer to the folks at USDA on that, but I do know that they have obviously been thinking about this problem and through our US context, but also in a broader sense of connecting rural Americans. Thank you. Thank you, Kelsey. And we have one more presentation before we get to our panel, and that is Claude Akin, who recently became President and CEO of WISPA, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which has more than 800 members dedicated to closing the digital divide through primarily fixed wireless broadband. Claude joined WISPA after nearly a decade at the FCC, where he served most recently as an advisor to Commissioner Clyburn. Claude? Thank you, Michael, for that kind introduction and thank you to New America for having me here today. This is my first public speaking engagement on behalf of WISPA, and I promise I'll keep it brief, mostly because I've historically dealt with wireline policy, so I'm still a little bit unsure about what to say on the spectrum side of things. That was maybe a joke. But it is that crossing of regulatory silos that can give us a fresh look at perspectives that have been received wisdom for so long. Universal service policy, infrastructure policy, and spectrum policy have historically been separated, but are actually all interrelated. I think fixed wireless is at the center of these conversations. So here's my bold proposition for the day, which some have already alluded to a little bit. Fixed wireless is the solution to much of our country's rural broadband problem. Already, more than four million Americans, many of whom would otherwise be in a digital desert, rely on fixed wireless broadband to connect to the internet. Hundreds upon hundreds of these small rural businesses have made it their mission to provide broadband that is reasonably comparable to the service that urban Americans receive. Maxed out personal credit cards and entrepreneurial grit have built these businesses, not federal subsidies. And according to one study, fixed wireless is on track to double its subscribership to eight million by 2021, fueled by several strong growth drivers. Perhaps the strongest driver it's, again, some have already alluded to, is the relatively low cost to deploy fixed wireless, which is a fraction of the cost of fiber. That's why our universal service policy should follow suit, recognizing the cost effectiveness of deployment as a significant factor in prioritizing federal broadband resources. There are areas where our federal policy approach recognizes that in areas where it does not yet. For example, we see a cost effectiveness principle at work through the FCC's use of a reverse auction framework for going forward distribution of some high cost subsidies. But that principle is not held everywhere. For example, the FCC's cost model that has calculated appropriate subsidies has been based on a fiber to the home deployment model. That does not make sense in many areas of the country and can result in arbitrage at the expense of the rate payer. Likewise, the cost effectiveness criterion is missing from other subsidy offers like the Rural Utility Services Grant and Loan Programs. That needs to change. On the infrastructure front, it is clear that reduced barriers to infrastructure deployment benefit broadband build out. The FCC has been working hard on small cell deployments and Congress and the administration have been working on streamlining infrastructure deployment on federal lands. But here's where things get interesting. When we talk about broadband infrastructure, we often think of the copper, fiber, radios, and towers that need to be built. And that is absolutely correct. But, and to the point of our discussion today, radio spectrum is also infrastructure. We cannot even get to the point where we build towers and hang radios if we do not have spectrum available for use. Imagine if there were a federal mandate to deploy fiber to every home but where all the optical fiber was bought up and held by a few large companies. How far would that get us? Likewise, when the goal is deploying broadband to every home and fixed wireless is indeed so cost effective at doing so, we need to ensure that spectrum is available on terms that ensure robust competition among many providers, not just a few. When we were talking about broadband infrastructure generally and rural broadband specifically, the conversation needs to include spectrum policy. In the past, spectrum policy was based on the assumption that a given swath of airways could only be used by one party in one geographic area at any given time. Oh, I'll use a road analogy since most people clearly understand that as infrastructure. It's like leasing a single lane of a highway to a single company. It's pretty clear that whatever the company wants to do with that lane, it will be able to do. But if the lane owner doesn't use that lane 24-7, the law says that no one else can use it even when it is sitting there empty during the downtime. Now think about rural areas. This empty lane problem is particularly salient for rural areas where there's a great deal of licensed spectrum with no traffic running over it but remains unable to be used for rural broadband. Modern spectrum policy recognizes that we have a limited number of highway lanes available and that we must find ways to enable multiple users to coexist in those lanes. Fortunately, the increasing sophistication of spectrum sharing technology allows more and more entities to use the same spectrum in the same geographic area in a coordinated way. As the father of young children, you don't have to indulge me as I apply to spectrum policy, the wisdom of Daniel Tiger's neighborhood. The poignant and relevant adage that sharing with you is fun for me too. Advanced sharing and flexible use regimes like those contemplated in the CBRS band are at the vanguard of new spectrum policy and we should do all we can to move those forward not backward. And in the case of licensing regimes, we also need to make sure that our spectrum policy is right sized. In other words, just as it does not make sense to build a six lane interstate to get across a town of a thousand people. It does not make sense to ask a broadband provider looking to serve that small town to buy spectrum rights across much larger areas. Another analogy is that it would be like asking a small business owner to lease an entire shopping mall when all they need is a kiosk. That is why census tract sized licenses make the most sense in the CBRS band. Smaller license areas mean more broadband for rural America and more competition everywhere. And this can be done in a way that benefits the treasury as well as the taxpayer. CBRS again is a perfect example of that. If the government licenses priority access in small areas instead of absolute rights over large areas, we'll no longer have the empty lane problem. The highest value use in every local area as measured by a bidder's willingness to pay will be the use that wins at auction. Whether that's a local public safety agency, a hospital, a university, a resort operator, a stadium or yes, a local fixed wireless operator. All kinds of bidders will be able to get access to and use that spectrum in a way that makes sense for each of them. And just to be sure that I am being crystal clear, if we want to incent businesses to deploy broadband in rural America, then we need smaller auctionable areas so that fixed wireless providers who are already there can invest in their infrastructure with confidence and more providers will follow bringing more choice and more competition. We can align universal service policy, infrastructure policy and spectrum policy. We can really make a dent in the rural broadband problem. We can rationalize the subsidy structure to support comparable service at lower cost to the government than rural Americans will win. If we can move forward with smart infrastructure policy that lowers barriers to entry to acquiring and deploying spectrum, as well as towers and radios, rural Americans win. And this can all be accomplished with a net gain to the US Treasury to boot. And we will work together with a variety of stakeholders to continue to push this forward. Thank you. Are there, we could take a question or two, if you have a question to specifically on what Claude was talking about, otherwise he's also going to stay and we'll have Q and A at the end as well, but so just give a quick chance. Yeah, sure, tell us who you are and everything. Hi, Jeff Marks with Nokia. Question about your membership. I know that you're still meeting a lot of your membership, but do they see CBRS as the most attractive spectrum band for what they're going to do? Or is there, I don't want to get too technical, but other bands that are on the horizon that you find most attractive? I would say that in the near to medium term, absolutely, CBRS is the most attractive. Hi, I'm Annalise Blair with the Pew Charitable Trust. You mentioned four million Americans for fixed wireless. I was wondering if there's a speed threshold for that number. Welcome to the panel then. So we can have our panel come up to the seats and start in just a second. There's actually names on there, so make it easy. I hope you all will think of more good questions or comments as we go through this, but I want to give the three panelists who haven't had a chance to speak yet just a few minutes to tell us what is top of mind for you on this topic, because you all bring different perspectives. So how about if we start with Paula Boyd, who is Senior Director for Government and Regulatory Affairs at Microsoft and previously served the Senior Counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. Paula? Microsoft has a lot of different things. And as you think about technology, one of the big aspects of technology that tends to be a little hidden, but we sort of experience it every day is essentially cloud computing. We go through our day interacting with online content and services that are pulled from the cloud. And what's critical about that is that you have to have broadband connectivity to experience that existence. That the potential of broadband in the cloud is pretty phenomenal. I mean, I think some of the speakers before me sort of hinted at this and sort of alluded to this, but when you think about telemedicine, when you think about homework gap challenges, when you think about pulling content in terms of entertainment, when you're a small business or a large business and you have content in the cloud and your employees are able to access that content, that happens in part because you have, the cloud exists, but you only get to the cloud if you have connectivity. And so when we talk about millions of Americans not being able to get connectivity or not having broadband, it means a loss in terms of the ability to participate in those kinds of experiences and services. And so one of the things that we did almost a year ago is made a commitment around rural broadband connectivity. We essentially said that we would go out and partner with broadband providers. We're not a broadband provider. We don't intend to be a broadband provider, but we had been working on a number of projects leveraging TV wide spaces globally. And last year we made a commitment to go out, partner with broadband providers and look to connect two million rural Americans over the course of five years. It's a pretty big challenge. It's a challenge for a company that's a tech company and not a broadband provider. So we're heavily dependent on our partners to achieve that. In addition to making the commitment about broadband connectivity, the other piece of broadband connectivity that we appreciate is pretty important. It's that if you're not connected, you've got to have some level of training around that connectivity. Microsoft has been involved in a variety of different kinds of trainings and it can be simple in terms of using a computer and using programs like Office and using tools, online tools, to even more sophisticated like standing up computer science courses in high schools to make sure that kids get access to those opportunities, which is something that we've been doing for a number of years. And so we also made a commitment around that in terms of training to accompany our broadband effort. Another piece of the puzzle that we also committed to was making our patents or technology available to the ecosystem to leverage patent-free without fee. The important piece of that though as well in terms of our commitment is an ask of the government to make sure that there is sufficient spectrum to enable the technology. I think Claude was very pointed in noting that if fixed wireless is going to be a solution or a big part of the solution in rural areas, if you don't have spectrum, that solution cannot really be deployed effectively. And so making sure that there's sufficient spectrum to enable the technologies is an important piece. Another important piece of it as well is broadband mapping, making sure that we have a very good handle on where broadband is needed, what places are without broadband, so that providers have a better sense of where the opportunities are and how to go about those opportunities. And so the last piece of our ask, I think, for policy makers is funding. Without funding, the challenge in rural areas is that it's hard to serve. It's hard to serve because you've got to try to figure out how to make the economics work. You have large swaths of land, you have much lower densities than you have in other places, and so you've got to figure out how you can recoup your investment. And this country through USF and through other funding sources have sought to ensure that rural areas are connected. And so we're hopeful and we would impress upon policy makers that making broadband funding available, or funding available for broadband is sort of a key piece of achieving connectivity in rural areas. I'll stop there, I could go on, but... Yeah, no, and we can circle back to some of that. So we'll hear next from Elizabeth Bowles, who is President and Chairman of the Board, of course, of Aristotle Inc., which is a broadband internet service provider and interactive media agency based in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth, I'm sure many of you know, is also the chair since last year, when she was appointed by Chairman Pi, is chair of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, which advises the FCC on these very issues. So, Elizabeth? So I didn't come with prepared remarks because I wanted to hear what everyone else is saying. So I have sort of two functions from where I sit. One is as a WISP. I deploy fixed wireless networks in rural Arkansas, predominantly. I also deploy networks in the city of Little Rock, but you don't have to go very far outside of Little Rock to be in rural America. It's maybe 10 miles outside the city limits, and it's as rural as anywhere else in the US. And so I very much appreciate Whitney's remarks about rural America, and I do think it's been forgotten. I do think that it's very easy when we start getting into policy debates to get caught up in the NFL cities and the population density areas and forget that the heartland of America is rural America. And so a lot of that has just been overlooked for too many years. I'm very encouraged by a lot of the conversations that I'm hearing. I'm encouraged by the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, the BDAC, because the entire purpose of that is to address barriers and limitations that are impeding the deployment of broadband with the goal of alleviating the rural divide, the digital divide. I'm gonna have to say that the digital divide is a real thing, whether the number's 39% or 35%. If you have even one school kid who can't have homework, then we haven't done our job. I was talking to somebody in the elevator coming up, and he was like, well, we got electricity done, we got phone done, why can't we get broadband done? And I think Spectrum is a huge piece of that. There's been, I think there's now a change in the way the policy makers view fixed wireless, whereas I remember having conversations as recently as three years ago, where they're like, well, that's not broadband. And now you have companies like AT&T realizing that that's what they need to deploy. And as fixed wireless equipment becomes more capable and as fixed wireless equipment becomes more available and able to meet speed requirements and latency requirements. And I'm all about what Kelsey Geiselman said about speed and latency and throughput. All of those things and no data caps. It is not broadband if it costs $700 a month to buy. And if you have mobile broadband in your rural community and you are streaming Netflix, HD, you will be paying $400 to $700 a month. That town does not have broadband. And I would like to throw one other thing out there about rural America. When I personally talk about comparable service in rural America, I'm in competition. One provider is insufficient. I don't care who the provider is. Where you see broadband adoption rates of 60, 70%, there are two to three providers in those communities. So getting one provider is a start but I think as we go long term, we need to have policies in place that build markets for multiple providers to want to come in and serve these rural America. And the homework gap is real as we all know but so is the telemedicine gap. I met with the community maybe last week they're Fairfield Bay. And they wanted to apply for a USDA grant. And the person I was talking to said they don't qualify. They don't need school kids. I said the average age of the residents in that community is 75. They have to drive two hours to get to a hospital. That is the problem that we're trying to solve and it exists on both ends. So you have the drain of the brain trust out of rural America. You don't have factories relocating there. You don't have economic development and it all hinges on broadband and broadband hinges on spectrum because fiber is great. I'm a huge fan and advocate of hybrid fiber fix wireless solutions. So fiber goes so far. It is awesome as a backbone. But at some point you've got to get to that farmer in the middle of nowhere and they really the most cost efficient way to do that is fixed wireless. So small option sizes as Claude said all of those things come into play and I think we have to take a global view of the entire problem. I encourage everybody to read what's coming out of the BDAC because those recommendations are supposed to set the groundwork and the framework for how we shift policy. Particularly the FCC with respect to getting funding into rural America. And then I have to say just on a personal note Congress has got to act. A lot of what is causing this problem is the fact that the last rewrite of the telecom act was in 1996 that we didn't even really have DSL in 1996. It was sort of a thing that they said any minute now it's gonna be really important. It's all very antiquated and a lot of what's tying funding streams up are rules of who can qualify for them. And so it's going to continue to go to phone companies it's gonna continue to go to eligible telecommunication providers and I don't wanna go down a rabbit hole but that's not an easy thing to do. My company's in the process of that right now and it is not easy, takes a long time and it's not cheap. And there's no reason for that when phone is now an IP service and the entire infrastructure that we have of USF funding is based on POTS lines and telephone service and we really need to wake up and turn around and say what policies are so antiquated that we need to be looking in a different direction? So I'm hopeful that what comes, I'm an idealist, I'm hopeful what comes out of the BDAC will actually spur some of these conversations. I'm hopeful that net neutrality gets passed through the Congress. I don't think the way that the FCC did it was the right way to go about it but I think that the bright line principles are something that we all can get behind but I think it's something that needs to be done at a level where we recognize as a policy matter for the nation that no throttling and no blocking and no pay prioritization are important. So for me, all of us need to pull together in the same direction and we tend to get pigeonholed by certain industry voices that are very loud and that hold spectrum and that warehouse spectrum and they have no intention and when we start talking about the use it or share it policies, we will be having some pretty strong pushback and pretty big arguments for the people who've been sitting on that spectrum for years and were willing to pay millions of dollars for the right to do so. Meanwhile, it's hurting rural America and then last thing and I'll shut up is and I actually would like hard questions by the way the last thing I wanna say is and I know that everybody in this room gets this is that no policy can work for everyone as a singular unit. We have to recognize that there are needs in the large cities for levels of spectrum for the mobile carriers and others that need to be recognized, they exist. That's a problem in Manhattan, it really is. It's not a problem in Little Rock and it's a darn sure not a problem in Scott, Arkansas. So when we start looking at spectrum policy, it needs to be varied and encouraged by a lot of what the FCC is saying on that front. They recognize that large municipalities are one thing and rural areas are something different but in CBRS in particular, the desire to get spectrum to serve these tier one and tier two and tier three cities is dwarfing the conversation about the rural communities that are townships and maybe unincorporated townships that are gonna get swept up in these large areas. So I'm gonna echo what Claude said, the smaller those auction areas can be at least outside the major metropolitan areas, the better off rural America is going to be. Okay, thanks. And our final panelist is Bob Nichols, the CEO and founder of Declaration Networks Group. Bob's company, The Poison, operates high-speed networks that provide broadband services in underserved communities under the new beam brand. Thank you, Michael and thank you everybody else for coming to this very important discussion. Declaration Networks, as Michael points out, provides high-speed internet in rural areas. Right now we're in two markets, one on the eastern shore of Virginia and another on the western side of Maryland, Garrett County, Maryland, both very remote areas, very sparsely populated areas and have been underserved, unserved areas for years. We have gone into these areas and deployed fixed wireless and I'm very heartened to hear the conversation today about bringing it back to why it's necessary. These areas have been declining in population for years. The young kids are graduating high school, going off to college and they're not coming back because they don't have connectivity like they get when they go to the colleges. There aren't the business opportunities. So when I put together Declaration Networks many years ago, it was really to drive some of the technology activities around TV white spaces and I worked with New America, Google and Microsoft in the early days to get some of the deployments out there to understand what this technology can provide and it's very powerful, the lower spectrums. Unfortunately, they're spliced up in six megahertz channels so the ability to deliver broadband was challenging and I'm happy to say that we've deployed TV white spaces very successfully in Garrett County. We have also used other unlicensed frequencies, five gigahertz, but about 30% of our deployments are customers today in Garrett County are supported with TV white spaces and enjoying speeds that exceed the broadband threshold and we're testing out new technology along with TV white spaces to aggregate channels to go even beyond that. So I know very well the impact of the policy that provided broadband for the TV white spaces to be opened up. I'm looking forward to the CBRS as everybody else is and hoping that that comes to fruition in a way that's positive for the rural areas as well. And I think there were some lessons learned through the TV white space policy activity that have been applied certainly to CBRS that we looked to take advantage of those. One of those being getting contiguous blocks. That all being said, there's a huge effort out there to close the digital divide. So we're doing it house by house, right? That's our mission, but there are literally hundreds of Garrett counties across the country that the larger incumbent carriers are not putting up a solution for. So over the years of evolving declaration networks, I put my money where my mouth is and we turned it into an operational system a couple years back with the focus to align the stakeholders on a cooperative model, align the funding mechanisms to help us address the needs of these rural areas that don't necessarily have a business case for fiber and have a very lean business case for fixed wireless. We've been successful in getting a USDA loan to build out expansion areas in both of our markets. We anticipate leveraging the USDA partnership going forward to expand into additional counties. Certainly we'll be taking advantage of the Connect America fund auction coming up. And I'm happy to say this morning we made an announcement with Microsoft where a rural air band partner with them as well. So we think that some of the early activity in TV white spaces actually has led the way to put some focus on the critical need for spectrum, fixed wireless spectrum as a very critical component to delivering high speed, high quality broadband services into these rural areas. All right, thanks Bob. So I have a few questions and then we can open it to the audience again. So before we get to come back to some of the specific bands of spectrum that may be at issue or very useful here, as one is one kind of general question that came up I think mainly in when Quad spoke at the top about subsidy programs because it seems to be that the thing the federal government is doing most overtly for years is spending billions of dollars through the Connect America fund and so on. So I guess just, generally it seems that spectrum for infrastructure would at a minimum provide those programs with a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn't they? That you could really get, really do more with the same amount of money using fixed wireless and shared or unlicensed spectrum than you would otherwise. So I don't want to answer my own question but I just wanted to clarify, see if you all had any comments on the connection between these subsidy programs which exist over here but the spectrum access which does not exist so well over here. So I don't know, Elizabeth, Quad, whatever. Sure, yeah, I think that, yes. I mean, no, it's true because when you're looking at the, for example, the CAF2 reverse auction that's going on, now you have to already have the spectrum to be able to deploy the technology in that spectrum before you can say that that's what you're going to use. So it really is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem because in the areas where a company might have a certain spectrum then they can maybe deploy a more effective technology whereas in another area where they don't, they might be relying on an unlicensed or licensed light solution that may be not as effective for whatever reason. So I think, yes, I think that spectrum availability and training spectrum as infrastructure as opposed to, I guess they treat it as real estate. I'm not really sure what the other analogy would be how it's treated but it does need to be treated as infrastructure or at least the way they treat rights of way because it is for the common good. And so yes, I think that that training spectrum as infrastructure and spectrum availability would enable all of those dollars to go a lot further than they currently can when it's on some kind of a higher standard. And you brought up an additional interesting point or important point that it would also allow perhaps more small and then it provided us to qualify in the first place. Exactly. Because I assume there's, from what you've been saying, there's difficulty qualifying for these funds. If you can't say up, show up front how you can deliver those speeds. Yeah. And I have to say this is nothing against any particular company who understands the rules very well but like AT&T they got $2,500 a sub up in an area of Wisconsin and they deployed fixed wireless at the cost of 300 a sub which is the arbitrage that I think Claude was talking about and that arbitrage is great but I would much rather see that $2,500 a sub having been spent more efficiently and I don't really, I think that the FCC and the USDA are coming to understand that they don't really need to be doing fiber to the home but they haven't yet come to understand how critical it is that spectrum availability is there in order to achieve the end because that money goes a lot further if you're not, if you don't narrow it down to smaller groups of people because you're giving huge chunks, larger chunks based on a fiber standard if that makes any sense. So yeah, I think spectrum is huge and smaller players could play if they knew they had access to the spectrum. Yeah, additionally to add to what Elizabeth said I couldn't agree with her more. There's additional costs that are layered on the equipment manufacturers when you have uncertainty with the spectrum policy. So they're hanging out there trying to put their development dollars in the right place and if there's a certainty associated with the policy with opening up spectrum, the equipment manufacturers will be able to provide a much more efficient delivery mechanism of the radios and the technology as well. So there's a total cost of ownership associated with the policy as it kind of drives through the value chain of delivering broadband. I'd also jump in and just speak to sort of the opportunity as well. I mean, we're focused on TV white spaces. We completely appreciate that it takes a number of different solutions to enable coverage in rural areas depending on density and population and terrain, et cetera. But wanted to just flag in terms of TV white spaces. I mean, the value proposition a little bit, folks have referenced on licensed spectrum is that it is on licensed spectrum and the value of on licensed spectrum in part is that you don't have to go to auction to get it. I mean, it's on licensed spectrum has been a part of the FCC's spectrum policy for decades. You don't have to go to auction to get it, which means that it reduces your initial cost in terms of deployment. And with TV white spaces, it also is lower in the band. So it's kind of optimal spectrum if you can get enough channels in part because it allows for better coverage and better range. When you think about TV white spaces if you compare it to Wi-Fi, for example, which is at 2.4 TV white spaces is below 700. Think of TV white spaces as enabling sort of four times the range, 16 times the coverage. So it is an opportunity and when you think about cost and when you think about what needs to be done in terms of enabling connectivity, you know, we toss out that it's important to look at all of the solutions, including on licensed and TV white spaces. Anything else on that? No, I think as I mentioned in my remarks, it's all, you know, these are all just pieces of the same puzzle as you alluded to Michael, like the few, if a subsidy model is geared towards fiber it's going to be more expensive in what Elizabeth was saying about 2,500 per sub. The 300 per sub and I just go in my mind like, well, we could have covered seven times as many people even more with that same amount of subsidy. So when you look at it holistically, when you look at the spectrum and infrastructure reform and all of it together then I think you can have a much more comprehensive picture of what the government should be doing. So to look at some of this spectrum in particular, Paula was just talking about TV white space, which of course are the vacant TV channels in markets where of course there's a whole lot more of those in more rural areas. So I guess like this, Bob, Bob's a great example his company of taking advantage of kind of precisely that combination like up in Garrett County, you know, which is where Deep Creek is that panhandle of Maryland between Pennsylvania and West Virginia where you had funding from Appalachian Regional Commission in the Garrett County Economic Development, fiber that was coming in from state of Maryland for backhaul that was paid for under the BTOP program. But when you started, you had access to TV white space, you knew you had that. So I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what are the advantages of using TV white space in that kind of area with the rugged terrain and the little hamlets? Well, yeah, it's a great case study, right, for a number of different reasons. The public funding associated with the private funding that we brought. So the public-private partnership that linked federal funding and county funding all to kind of deliver a solution to a very remote area. TV white spaces, you know, as Paula points out has greater coverage, greater range than the higher frequencies. We're using five gigahertz and TV white spaces. So we can deliver five gigahertz into an area and deliver a tremendous amount of capacity and then distribute through the trees, which is quite thick, in Garrett County to the individual residences using TV white spaces. We're all coming off of a fiber network, as Michael pointed out. And we're serving homes that would just never dream of being able to get fiber to their house, certainly, let alone any other service. We're largely using satellite TV connectivity. They have DSL at best. A lot of them are still on dial-up. So we're literally changing lives in these areas. Home businesses are getting renewed because they're now able to take advantage of the digital divide. In rural areas, you know, it's very common for school age, high school kids, you know, to go to the local town an hour away to sit around McDonald's and get access to Wi-Fi to do their homework. Now that doesn't need to happen, right? We can deliver broadband right to their house and they can get their schoolwork done. Telemedicine applications as well. Elizabeth pointed out an area that had a challenge getting to a hospital. We have that very issue in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. They don't have a hospital in the county at all. They have to go to the next county or go to Virginia Beach, which is well over an hour away to get to a hospital. So telemedicine applications are critical in some of these areas. So when it goes on and on and on, you know, the applications. One more question. Your deployment benefited from some public investment of CAPEX on the front end, but is it sustainable now as a commercial network there and you're in the Eastern Shore as well? Yeah, it's a great point. So sustainability is the key, right? So it really doesn't serve anybody if you put up a network that can't over the years be operated and sustained. So the capital infusion that we got from the ARC and the Garrett County was absolutely required. We brought our own investment from a private perspective. We set up a centralized knock facility. We hired locally and I'm happy to say yeah, absolutely. It is a sustainable path forward. And some areas within Garrett County are more urban than others. We're serving those as well. And that helps the business case. So now we turn to Paula for the more challenging part about TV white space, which is we still don't have regulatory certainty, right? I mean, the FCC adopted TV white space originally and in terms of resolving all the reconsiderations in 2010, but then we went almost immediately into the, you know, a six or more year process of the incentive auction and they're still unfinished business, which has really slowed deployments. So what does the commission need to do so that rural America can move ahead? Yeah, no, absolutely. It's been a long push and, you know, it's interesting to sit here and hear Bob talk about sort of being in the, you know, pushing TV white spaces networks out, you know, years ago. I mean, I can't imagine sort of the work he has put into it and sort of the uncertainty that still sits around the rules. So as Michael mentioned previously, the rules that are in place and the rules that are in place have allowed folks like Bob to push networks out. However, the rules is essentially, there's a challenge because the auction came about, the auction legislation came about in 2012 and that impacted sort of what was going on in the TV ban. The FCC has done their auction rules, they're repacking broadcasters and as a result of that, there are some outstanding rules that need to be addressed. From our perspective, it's really important that the FCC concludes its reconsideration proceeding. It's a proceeding that it's looked back at its rules governing TV white spaces and refined them as in the new context of the auction and the repack. In that proceeding, there's the opportunity to ensure that there are two additional channels available with respect to use for TV white spaces. There are also other technical rules around things like antenna height and power levels that would also improve the opportunity in terms of deployment. There's another proceeding on database issues and that is something that we're hopeful that the FCC can close out in the near term versus the far term and there are a few other issues that are out there but the key really is to ensure is for the FCC to make decisions that ensure that there's sufficient spectrum for TV white spaces as well as ensuring that the technical rules exist to really enable the technology. From our perspective, the way we think about it is trying to ensure that the ecosystem exists for the technology to be deployed and evolved over time. If the technology is able to grow and evolve, it means that you're gonna get to higher speeds and you're gonna be able to push the price down. When we think about TV white spaces technology, we think about it in terms of a few different opportunities. Rural broadband is the one that we're heavily focused on but to make that work, we have to ensure that the technology gets deployed and pushed out which will then reduce the price, cost of deployment in rural areas. So for us, there's also, according to the FCC's rules, there's the ability to do high power and low power and when we think of the low power opportunities, we think of sort of what we refer to as kind of enhanced Wi-Fi, sort of better in building coverage, better in home coverage because it's lower spectrum, it gets you a little bit better range than Wi-Fi and then we also think about the internet of things opportunity. All of that, if we're able to really, if those ecosystems really get going, then there's going to be an impact on cost in terms of the rural areas and that's what we're hopeful for. Okay, thanks. So now if we look at, so move up the frequency chart because as I said at the very beginning, the toolkit for rural America is going to depend on having, there's different spectrum serves different purposes. So you need low band for the coverage and penetration, mid band gets you pretty good propagation, pretty good coverage but more importantly, more capacity and then in the highest frequencies of course, it's just purely capacity but you're going to need to be line of sight or very close, very small area. So in this mid band, a question came up earlier, I think it was the quad about, you know, do wisps, how important is the citizens band which is 3550 to 3700, how important is that to wisps? So I guess I'd start asking maybe start with Elizabeth, they ask why are wisps so focused on getting access to mid band spectrum? What difference is that making for you now? I mean, wisp used to be very much geared toward the combination Bob's using like TV white space and five gigahertz on all unlicensed. Now it seems to be much more of a focus on the mid band license spectrum. Yeah, well a couple of things are happening in 900 which was a big spectrum for wisps and with respect to SCADA which has now moved into rural areas, it's always been used for that in metropolitan areas but now in rural areas you have the utilities using 900 spectrum for that which interferes which means we have a deployment and legacy 900 deployment and during certain cycles of the day because the electric company, they jump on whichever channel they want and so they're not on one channel so we're having trouble working around them because for 12 hours it'll be on this channel and then the shift will change and then it's on this different channel and so our network goes down on regular basis and then the farmers are also using 900 for the tractors and so that band became what used to be great for propagation, it used to be okay for bandwidth and throughput became extremely crowded in rural areas and less solid and so you were getting a lot of in and out problems and not the same user experience and not the same service level that we want to provide to our customers. Wisps have always been in five gigahertz than the unlicensed spectrum. We moved into 365 when that became available as a licensed light option and so my company deploys a fair amount of that but that's also not really licensed and I do believe that obviously spectrum policy has to have a good blend of licensed and unlicensed spectrum but there really is no beating having a dedicated spectrum as far as throughput is concerned and your ability and your power levels and not having to share or compete with others so it's less of a problem in rural America like five gigahertz is still viable in rural America it's not really viable in the cities anymore because the cities are putting up equipment that interferes directly with the unlicensed spectrum so we still need the unlicensed the equipment is less expensive and it's easy to deploy but what's attractive at CBRS is that it would give us a licensed light or shareable spectrum where we would have some dedicated areas that we could deploy within and in a spectrum base that is very adjacent to what we're already deploying that functions from a propagation standpoint very similar to what we're used to working with and so it's just a nice place to move and the upper band spectrums are not as optimal because when you're talking about rural deployments at least you are going further than a mile so there's not really it's not all that helpful unless the factor you're trying to reach is at the base of the tower and so that mid band sort of is this sweet spot from a WISP perspective right so those priority access licenses could give you a kind of a quality of service anchor yes exactly if only you could acquire them but that's the there's the rub right the debate currently going on right now is that the mobile carriers want to see them be the size of traditional cellular licenses which would really mean they would be the only ones who could afford them such a bad idea and I will let Claude address it from the WISP perspective I just wanted to say that it's just such a bad idea no I you know I have referenced the fact that I'm I'm relatively new at WISP but I would say the large majority of my communications with with the membership as far as been about CBRS and how critical it is to the future of you know fixed wireless's ability to to compete and to but provide service in in rural America so getting getting the framework right so that you know we're not we're not asking for preference we're just asking for an ability to compete and the smaller license areas are absolutely critical for our members ability to compete in in that ultimate auction and in rural areas even the census tracts aren't all that small census tracts can be pretty large they can be pretty large even in rural areas absolutely let me ask you also this is probably maybe initially for Claude and then others could try me the ban just above that so it's one thing you know so CBRS has seven ten megahertz priority licenses and then above that eighty megahertz of effectively unlicensed general authorized access so if you have those even a few pals as your anchor you can leverage the GAA but when you're talking about wanting to deliver say a hundred megabits per second to you know on a point to multi-point basis in a you know in a hamlet you know the kind of places Bob serves you could really use even you know you really need even more spectrum than that so I mentioned at the outset that there's this question of what to do with the five hundred megahertz above thirty seven hundred which is currently very underutilized uh... from the point of view of course of the broadcast industry the cable industry and so on it's incredibly important because this is where all the video distribution occurs the downlink band for fixed satellite service and yet they only are really using a small percentage of actually using uh... a certain small percentage overall of the capacity in the band could you say a bit about uh... and for full disclosure new american and wispa were uh... kind of primary movers in the broadband access coalition which filed a petition asking to access that band uh... but maybe you could you should talk more about if you didn't mention that I was going to okay why yeah how this fits sure sure so you know as as michael mentioned there's this uh... huge swath of spectrum out there that is that is relatively underutilized uh... that's uh... you know wispa and new america were were founding members of this broadband access coalition that we would you know put together a proposal that uh... that we thought would be we call it the win-win-win proposal because i think we we tried to think critically about it and come up with something uh... something for everybody that you know existing uh... earth stations would would be able to be protected for the spectrum that that they are using that the the mobile industry would would have uh... some some dedicated spectrum that they would be available at auction and that the the remainder uh... would be available for as as michael mentioned uh... you know point to multi-point fixed wireless uh... you know really be able to bring the the benefits of that wide swath of spectrum to a broader group of stakeholders as possible kind of the high level yeah and that would be on a you know on a shared a shared basis yeah localized basis where which actually is technically in the rules now for point to point where if you can court if you the fixed services co-primary in that band if they can coordinate a path that doesn't affect the earth stations they can there's fairly few in that band because of existing understanding that the earth stations uh... need to be protected at all times on all five hundred megahertz in a huge area around where their dish is located that you know so what a key part of our proposals that that so-called uh... you know full band for our protection the entire five hundred is not needed that they just need to be protected for what they're actually using and then the fixed wireless operators quote coordinate you know say for uh... a certain neighborhood uh... or a certain uh... small town you coordinate in if you're if if it works out in terms of where you're pointed in relation to the earth stations you could just use that spectrum and then you have a whole lot of capacity that that makes gigabit gigabit fast fixed wireless entirely possible provisioning for example a hundred megabits per second to all your subscribers you know in that neighborhood uh... and it's pretty you know it's decent enough propagation that you can go through trees so uh... so that's a big uh... a big part of the toolkit of the future indeed and i think some you know spectrum it's it's also why verizon for example is so interested and so active on cvrs because even though it's much less capacity than they have up at twenty eight gigahertz in the millimeter wave the propagation is so much better that it would greatly reduce their cost of deployment for these fixed wireless these thirty million fixed wireless connections that they're planning to deploy over the next uh... five-day years okay uh... so speaking of the mobile carriers and and then i'll go to the audience after this quick question i mean this may be another one that if you know my bias in answers itself but but but it's worth pointing out that five g you know has become this uh... catch all you know mantra phrase to to to sort of have that which has in in my view the mobile carriers basically asking for all the new spectrum that comes that can be made available they need all of it low band mid band millimeter wave because somehow mobile five g is going to be the future of america or something i mean how is the fact so i guess the question is does the five g ecosystem really not include anything but mobile carriers uh... now the five g ecosystem doesn't just include mobile carriers that's uh... that's a really nice p r spin on five g but i would argue that some of the fixed wireless providers are already deploying five g and the mobile carriers are just out there saying that to justify their desire to get more spectrum because they wanted to play their small cells all over every single block in manhattan and that's great but uh... and part of this is because i'm in conversations with them all the time on the b-deck and it's interesting seeing where their pain points are because some things they're really willing to give on it's like you know what i'm not going to vote for twenty five three speed standard because i can't support it we have a definition in the state model code of broadband that includes latency twenty five three minimum latency requirement and no throughput mobile carriers can't support it but they're like you know i'm not going to vote for that but met but when you start talking about uh... deployment and where the small cells can go and anything that impinges or starts to create pressure on their ability to deploy small cells when they want where they want kind of at the end and they get very triggered and they get very uh... they throw down and they will talk for a very long time about it so for me the idea that five g equals mobile is a giant pr spin and i can drive through rural arkansas and they don't even have three g so i'm not really sure what they are what they're exactly arguing once you get outside of the metropolitan areas or why they would need spectrum to do it they haven't even managed to get for g out there so yeah i'll add that that's another one of the things that i i've heard uh... extensively from from the members on that is just uh... the frustration you know particularly as it relates to cbrs that this this is a this is a band that you know they can use to provide rural broadband and this is what everyone has been telling them to do uh... you know since time immemorial like we need to build out rural broadband and the ability to do so is within their grasp and they feel it slipping away uh... under the guise of five g to mobile carriers which is incredibly frustrating for them and just as a footnote i would commend to to anyone who can get access to it uh... new street which is a wall street you know an analysis investment analysis firm that specializes a lot in telecom they put out a deep dive uh... analysis and had a webinar on the verizon fixed wireless plan you know that to address an additional thirty million households in the top hundred ms a's and they basically said that you know where they got that number was along together with fios with eleven million fios subscribers that'll put them that'll cover about two-thirds of the homes in the top hundred metropolitan areas but noted but they said very specifically that it would be economically unjustifiable for you know for verizon to go you know using millimeter wave spectrum particular they couldn't go out beyond a certain population density even in the top hundred ms a's so in other words they may be in petomic but they're not going to be in gaithersburg for example or frederick or certain places so uh... you know obviously where the homes are close together but there's basically a tipping point where even with fixed wireless using the high frequency spectrum they're not going to go beyond it's not economical in terms of their their level of profitability to go beyond a certain point and there's probably not going out beyond going out outside of those top hundred ms a's either uh... for the most part uh... so so once again it shows how if we're gonna reach the rest of america we're gonna need to make sure the spectrum is available to everyone uh... so let's go to the audience for remaining time since uh... and then yeah let us know who who you are yes yes steve uh... steve song from the network startup resource center uh... comment on tv white space i mean for anyone who's been involved in kind of policy and regulatory advocacy it's been a very frustrating and long road to to getting there and and that the situation we find ourselves in now is i mean i spoke to jim carlson cross and wireless a couple weeks ago i asked him what the biggest network they had was and and it was around fifty notes i mean which you know when you compare to white pilots i mean it's a trivial amount of technology and so we have this catch twenty two of between manufacturing and regulation and i mean you already highlighted the issues with uh... regulation in the u.s. that there really limits the potential of the technology especially in terms of the need for channel bonding in order to deliver broadband like speeds the catch twenty two exist between manufacturing and regulation and regulators to some degree wait for scale up in manufacturing to uh... to to make regulatory changes certainly uh... elsewhere in the world that that's the kind of signal they're looking for is there an opportunity to actually i mean uh... to uh... to help these companies like a doctor and and carlis wireless uh... across and wireless to i mean these are american companies that uh... that are surviving incredibly under the circumstances i mean are is there a scope to you know to create policies to to help them thrive more all jump in and you know they're european providers yeah well uh... so i'll jump in i mean i i absolutely agree with you that uh... you know with the right regulatory framework with the right policy framework you know it gives folks like art the manufacturers you mentioned the opportunity to really survive in excel mean what i can say is that we're pushing we continue to push really hard to try to get to that point you know all the things that you talk about in terms of channel bonding the evolution of the technology getting to to larger-scale uh... deployments is is what we're pushing on we're pushing on that from a policy perspective we're pushing on it through partnerships uh... through a rural air ban initiative like you know the partnerships with bob so we're we're definitely working really hard to try to ensure that that ecosystem exists to allow the technology to really take off yeah i guess what i would say is hindsight is twenty twenty right i mean looking back on the uh... the original order uh... you know i have had many conversations about this you know boy wouldn't it have been great if there was a block of tv white spaces that was in the order in the repacking actually happened prior to the order coming out i mean that would have you know push things tremendously forward in my opinion uh... relative to the certainty associated with you know putting uh... uh... dollars capital dollars out there like adapter and carlson about uh... radio manufacturing the uncertainty that's now dragged on that we're still talking about just just makes it even worse uh... in many respects uh... the good news is i think that the policies that are uh... in place today for channel aggregation as an example uh... is a huge game changer we're using uh... uh... not carlson not uh... uh... daftram but uh... redline and they have the ability to open their channel sizes you know to aggregate uh... three four channels uh... that are adjacent uh... and uh... you know they're going through some some activity now with sort of certifying that against the rules uh... but we've tested that successfully in markets uh... and the markets that were serving are quite remote so there are three four five even six uh... contiguous channels in the existing space so uh... there's there's a lot of lessons that have been learned i believe uh... and as i said i think it's informed some of the policies that are uh... coming up with some of the spectrum activity that's going forward and hopefully that uh... that'll resolve itself you know there there are a number of issues out there but we believe that there's some low-hanging fruit that the fcc can close out you know they have been uh... working on these issues for a long time you know and i'd like to think at least from a technical perspective there is a comfort level in terms of understanding uh... with challenges or the questions before them and so we continue to encourage the fcc to close out some of those uh... some of what we think are low sort of low-hanging fruits issues that that we think that they're they're fully capable of closing out that's so long in some cases this the staff specialist who worked on them for years of left uh... question over here uh... casey home with davis right remain think this is for you elizabeth you talked earlier about recommendations coming out of b-dack and how those may inform some of the spectrum policy decisions can you explain that lake and and build on that the b-dack is made was made up of five working groups and three of them analyzed various segments one was competitive access to infrastructure which is what it sounds like one was the federal infrastructure and citing group and one was recommendations about removing barriers in the state municipal barriers to broadband deployment within that recommendation which was approved out of the b-dack in january there's a there are recommendations for study groups that need to be created with respect to some things with respect to it's mostly infrastructure based in the sense of of um... vertical assets or polls or or accessibility but there are some references to spectrum and was far as treating spectrum as infrastructure that is a place where those study groups would need to start looking at spectrum as well and they i think there were two groups that they recommended to be created out of that the other two working groups are the municipal model code working group in the state model code working group those groups don't directly address spectrum because they're not it's not in there we were asked not to address spectrum but if you read those recommendations then you can see sort of what um... the b-dack believes is necessary to improve and encourage deployment from a municipal and state perspective and then that was hopefully going to come back to the FCC and we have asked as a group the FCC they'll allow us to start to address some of the spectrum issues because means specifically asked like i said not to but uh... and obviously proceedings that are ongoing would not be within our purview at all but with respect to the infrastructure which is completely within our task that's all in the in the proposals that's fcc dot gov slash b-d-a-c all there and our meeting is tomorrow it is open uh... you can go to the fcc and see it and it's also live streamed on their website should be good come for the fireworks the first the first uh... the first presentation is going to be rates and fees committee which is an ad hoc committee they're going to talk about rates and fees surprisingly which is by the way one of the biggest uh... arguments in the whole group then we will address the municipal code and then we will address the state code i believe that's the order and the state code should be extremely controversial if the press is to be believed so come listen i think we have one more question john solentino i work in telecom infrastructure god bless our policy makers but i wonder if they really appreciate what it takes to deploy radio in rural areas elizabeth you talked about the interference issues with nine hundred meg and five gig and bob you talked about channel bonding and the need to get these wider wider channels maybe you could just share a little more about the challenges in rural areas and and also do we know what's happening with the uh... database administrators database i have no knowledge of the database administrators so a couple things uh... yes very challenging uh... as john points out you haven't heard the pain out of elizabeth and myself it's you know we're holding back a little bit because it is painful uh... at times uh... but the focus needs to be on on the need right as it is a desperate need uh... and i think everybody has echoed up here uh... you can't forget about rule on this folks out there that are really relying on the broadband that we're delivering to him today uh... and are extraordinarily happy that uh... we're doing it uh... as it relates to the uh... the database administrators you know there's a there's a as a few uh... database administrators out there i think nominate uh... out of the u k has stepped up and is going to be uh... providing uh... services uh... sometime this summer uh... and uh... there's other other providers as well as i'm not sure if that addresses what your your question was yet so i was the president i'm sorry no just because i heard that too that nominate just so you know that i mean or others you probably know about it nominate uh... is the product think the probably the primary database administrator for tb white space in the u k i believe they're getting in they're involved also with you know this is being deployed now rules were just adopted in south africa uh... it's happening in south korea and some other countries with the tb white space and so nominate is more of a little more of a global database administrator yeah i was going to say that uh... i was the before we had a professional president uh... i was the president of whisper for three years which is basically the chairman of the board of that organization and then i was the legislative chair for two years and i'm still involved in rural policy for whisper the difference in talking with the people that i talked to both of the fcc and uh... on the hill from when i started that in twenty ten and to today is marketed but it has been this enormously long education process and so when i would came into that position the first year i was there in twenty ten i immediately said we have to educate usd a and we talked a lot to the fcc because we care a lot about spectrum and i came in and said no we have to be talking to usd a we have to be talking to the ag committee at uh... on the hill we have to be talking to small business administration is that we're not talking to all of the people we need to be talking to and so we started develop we had a whole road show for usd a and they walked out and they said oh this is fixed wireless thing it actually is a thing and so the one thing the one thing that i will give to a tnt and verizon deploying fixed wireless is at least we're not having that fight anymore but you know that i think that the policy makers do understand that fixed wireless as a play that is part of the solution and so now it's a matter of educating them on what are the policy considerations that they need to be taking into account to enable fix wireless it's all it's it's unintentional it's the way wireless is defined in certain statutes to mean mobile it's the way it's all little ticky things in different places that they're not educated enough to realize great problems for fix wireless deployment and that i think is all of our jobs is to educate them so that they understand no if you if you do this you're actually injuring fixed wireless and fixed wireless is the great hope of rural america everybody says so even these you know price cap carriers are saying so century link is being dragged kicking and screaming into fix wireless get some policy considerations that take care of those of us who've been doing this for the last ten years that's kind of i i think it's it's been really slow but they're getting it slowly that's a perfect a perfect and hopeful way to to wrap this up so i said i don't want to miss it so and join me in thanking our our speakers thank you all for attending hopefully if if you're not on our regular invite list you know you can uh... do that right off our home page new america dot org and check your areas of interest in your good invitations to events thank you