 And first, let me invite up Kathleen Ham, who was part of the Spectrum Policy Task Force and is now at T-Mobile. Also invite up Evan Pearl, who is still at the FCC 20 years later and was part of the Spectrum Policy Task Force and still does Spectrum Policy at the FCC. And, uh, come on. Cover us a little bit about the FCC. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for the FCC. And, uh, last, I want to call up, uh, Ruth Milkman, who was in practice but not at the FCC at the time of the Spectrum Policy Task Force, but anyone who is familiar with Spectrum Policy is very well aware of Ruth's, uh, career and, uh, contributions to Spectrum Policy, including at the FCC during the Obama Administration, and, uh, now in private practice once again. So thank you all very much for, uh, joining us today. So Chris post this is the, the report is the, the flux capacitor, although I'd also ask, is it the thalorian, um, which, you know, looked really cool, but didn't really, you know, go anywhere in the real world. Uh, I like to think that, uh, this report, and I actually agree with the comments that Meredith made, that this report, uh, had, uh, an enormous role in creating the wireless world of today. And in part, uh, to appreciate that, let me, uh, uh, ask, uh, folks here. Um, so what do you think, what would you want to remind people about what the wireless world was like in 2002, including from a policy perspective? What were these policies that weren't keeping up, uh, with the, um, market demand? Why was 2002, uh, an important time to be, uh, to be doing this? Let me, uh, uh, start with the route that this ended and we'll, uh, we'll work down to, uh, Kathleen. The 2003 CMRS competition report, to remind myself of what the sort of basic facts were in 2002, their subscribership at that point was 141.8 million mobile subscribers compared to Kathleen Kintzal's what it is today, but it's a lot more. More than double. Nationwide penetration was only 49%. It's now well over 100%. Mine'd be 7%. Um, and, and only 8% of those people who were subscribed to mobile service subscribed to some type of mobile internet services. That was what, um, Commissioner Baker said, that people were very focused on voice at the time and only 20% use text messaging or, uh, of that group. Why I was just beginning to play a role in hot spots but was nowhere near as sufficient as, and part of this, I think, uh, you asked Harold a lot about the policy. We were still very much in, uh, old, you know, in the transition, I guess we're still in the transition, from the old command and control way of organizing a spectrum to the market-based approach and the auctions, flexible use have been around for a decade or more. Um, and the auctions had started only a few years before I guess, right? So it was still pretty early on in transitioning to a more market-based approach. And that's one of the reasons that the report setting up the orientation towards markets was... Well, of course I agree with everything that you said. I know better than to disagree but you also, there's a reason for agreeing because she's usually right. Um, so, let me just... Ruth, um, focused on things that are different and I would say, I want to focus on things that are the same. Um, one of the things that are the same was the view that there was a growing demand for a spectrum and that the supply wasn't keeping up. And I just want to take a quote from the Spectrum Policy Cast Force, which, you could use it now, it says, there has been a dramatic increase in overall demand for spectrum-based services and devices, accompanied by particular demand for mobile and portable spectrum-based applications. This is true for both traditional license services and services offered to unlicensed devices. I mean, you could put that in a report now and it would be the same. So, you know, while the technology has changed, you know, 3G was the latest thing then and 5G is now being built out. But the pressure to expand capacity, you know, through getting more spectrum and through new technologies is still the same. So, there's a lot that feels the same. I'll stop with that. Yeah, I would agree. Looking back at the report, it just struck me how many things are still the same, but the technology has evolved dramatically since 2002. I mean, you think about, you know, Meredith's flip phone, that was the cool phone of the day. We didn't have smartphones. Everybody was using 2G. There was a lot of talk about 3G. And even if you had 3G, it was a walled garden. It was really a real connection to the internet. You know, you had some new competition emerging with AT&T and Bell Atlantic now, Verizon, Wi-Fi was in its very early stages and certainly wasn't in your phone. We had a lot of success with the early auctions and it's interesting, since 2002, the auctions have raised nearly $200 billion for the U.S. Treasury, which is just absolutely amazing. And at the time, everybody was talking about spectrum below, well, 3GHz was the cool spectrum band. Now, you know, we're talking about mobile use as high as 12GHz and beyond, so the technology has definitely evolved dramatically since 2002. So a lot of things the same, but I think the technology has driven a lot of new uses and benefits. So, as someone who was working and was fairly new to the public interest community at the time, one of the things that was true then was that basically the organizations, the two public interest organizations that were working on this, Media Access Project and New America Foundation and the two people who were working on this were mostly me and Michael Calabrese. Our organization, I've moved to PK and they now call that piece of New America Foundation, OTI, but that is one element that I think unfortunately has not changed nearly as much as it could, but one thing I can say is somebody who is in the public interest community outside and where unlicensed spectrum was just bursting on the scene. We take Wi-Fi for granted, we take Bluetooth for granted, but this, one of the things that I think that was really important about what was going on was what we used to call the property school versus the common school as a philosophy and there were huge shouting matches and ideological wars over this. I mean it was really like you'd get together in these conference rooms. Kind of things. For those who believe that, and I will say that, you know, as somebody who was in the unlicensed, you know, camp at the time, the concern that we had was that the fix was in, that this was basically going to be the triumphant march of licenses as property. But it turned out, you know, that it was a pretty balanced and nuanced report. So I'd like to ask, you know, Evan and Kathleen, as people were inside, did people come in with a particular set of expectations and then as you dug into it, things changed? Was it, you know, to the extent that you can declassify some of this stuff and, you know, fill us in on the op gossip 20 years later? What was it like on the inside in terms of the understanding of what Chairman Powell was trying to accomplish here? Were there particular things that people really wanted to see? How did that, you know, work out to the best that you can, you know, tell us? Now, Powell had brought in Paul Colazzi from DARPA. And those who don't know DARPA, DARPA is kind of the think tank of DOD. They innovated, I think they claim they created the Internet. But, and so he was a big think kind of guy and he really wanted to sort of break the glass and do some different things. I will say, just from my own bias at the time, the auctions program had been tremendously successful at the FCC, really setting up a market-based solution for allocating and assigning spectrum. And I for sure, sitting on the task force, wanted to make sure that that was definitely part of the equation. I think at the time it was a lot of interesting also on licensed and some other ideas that maybe we'll talk about, but never really went anywhere, like interference temperature. But for the most part, I think there was, all ideas, there were no bad ideas. All ideas are on the table. A lot of people came to the table understanding that auctions have been a big success. But what else could we do to improve spectrum management? And at the time, I would also say NTIA was not part of this discussion and I think Meredith might have mentioned, but it really was only the following year that there was an MOU between the FCC and NTIA on spectrum management, which I think was a really important development, but not that sort of coordination was not part of the report. I must say that I agree completely with Kathleen, which reminds me of the old joke about congressional speeches, that everything has been said, but not everybody has said it. So I'll earn my keep here and go over some of the same things that Kathleen said. So one of the questions that Harold asked about were, what were Harold's goals? And I think one goal was promoting greater access to spectrum. And I think he was very practical and eclectic about how to do that. He understood the license model, but there was also this opportunity for unlicensed devices and opportunistic access. But there was one concern that not all, there was a great demand for spectrum, but not all spectrum was available. Not all spectrum was being used and it couldn't be used for various institutional reasons. But the second thing was that he wanted to increase the efficiency of use and put spectrum to the highest value uses. And I think he believed that markets do something, they do something useful. So I think those were the objectives. But I think Paul Colazzi was brought in by Harold to deal with the first issue, promoting greater access to spectrum. And the hope was that through new technologies, whether software-defined, radio-dynamic spectrum access, that spectrum that wasn't being used could be used without causing harmful interference in the conference. So one of his innovations that Kathleen mentioned that didn't go anywhere was this interference temperature concept. And it was the idea of allowing use of spectrum below the noise floor so that he would first establish what the interference environment was and what the noise floor was. And then he wanted to have ubiquitous devices measuring this in real time and then allowing opportunistic use of licensed spectrum by unlicensed devices subject to attack on interference temperature. It sounded like a good idea. I was never convinced that it was workable. I think, well, that there were a lot of other people who were unconvinced. But in any case, it was an interesting idea. And I give Chairman Powell credit for being open to new ideas. The whole thing, if you're not willing to fail, you're never going to do anything new. And Colazzi was a smart guy and Dortmund had done a lot of great things. I think one of the things that is frequently underappreciated and that Meredith Baker alluded to the U.S. being a global leader and continuing to be a global leader, I think that people don't really appreciate how much innovation in policy, especially in an area like spectrum, where every aspect of it from who gets used what and how and what powers and what purposes, how much that really depends on innovative public policy. And when we look at the report today, I think that we would agree that dramatically it holds up very well and has contributed to the success of the current wireless technology, this idea of moving away from command and control, relying more on market mechanisms, enhancing spectrum access are all things that have really driven the spectrum policy and therefore spectrum expansion and here more so than in any other country. We all in the U.S. love to pat ourselves on the back, but the fact is that unlicensed spectrum started here. And that's why Wi-Fi started here. Spectrum auctions started here and that's why we were the first to deploy nationwide wireless networks. I can go on with other things, but that innovation is important. Evan, you touched on this with interference temperature though and Lord knows I'm getting ready to do my receiver standard NOI comments for the next Monday. So just to put it to Ruth and Kathleen, what do you think we missed? What were some of the Deloreans as opposed to the flux capacitors of the spectrum report? And for all of you, why do these problems still persist today? Because if we're bringing up receiver standards 20 years later, there has to be a reason for that. Are they the same reasons? Are they different reasons? Was it institutional issues? What do you think is the reason we keep coming back to some of these things? There are no new ideas, just recycled ideas on some of them. That seems to be true with spectrum policy, but receiver standards were an issue. They continue to be an issue. And a reason I think a lot of the problems persist was I think I recall a memo coming out of the General Counsel's office of the FCC at the time saying that maybe there was a legal authority and in fact Congress gave for the digital transition specifically gave the FCC authority to regulate receiver standards. So there is a question mark about I think the legal authority and obviously there are a lot of devices out there. And you know, it's not an easy task to pull all that back. And so it is hard and I think some of the harder issues are the ones that continue to persist but I'm really glad that the commission has taken it up today. And hopefully that is an issue that can be tackled. But it does present from a spectrum management standpoint it creates some very poor incentives I think in the use of the spectrum. You can have the worst sloppiest technology and create the cheapest devices that are going to encroach on your neighbor's spectrum and that seems to be, you know, as the spectrum has gotten more crowded and frankly the value of its use more and more important. I think these types of issues just have got to be tackled. So but back in the day, back in 2002 I think it was maybe a bit too early to do that. I think one of the, to me a step back, one of the reasons that problems persist definitely is right. Receiver standards in particular these legal authorities less than Crystal Clear shall we say and that will be an obstacle. But we have institutional problems as well. So one of the great things about the spectrum task force is it was a formal way of having a cross-bureau analysis and thinking about spectrum and the FCC's bureaus, the mass media bureau does, broadcast and the international bureau does, satellite and the wireless bureau does. Not only, you know, the cellular services but all these private services that you guys, that most of the time you don't think about aviation, maritime, etc. And for the first time in this spectrum task force all the parts of the commission came together to think collectively about spectrum and that set the stage for future efforts like the spectrum chapter of the national broadband plan like the incentive auction task force I think is really important and it also sort of, I think I wasn't there at the time but I'll conjecture that it also got people in the habit of talking to each other more. The other big institutional problem is the FCC and TIA split. I think that the United States, I am told that the United States is the only country in the world that has this kind of division in the way it manages spectrum. That most countries have a single spectrum authority that deals with both spectrum used by their governments and spectrum used by commercial users. I'm not anticipating that this is going to change anytime soon but it does create particular barriers to the kind of national spectrum strategy development and implementation that I think we all agree that we need. I would totally agree with that and I do think the NTIA-FCC coordination is really, really important and it's especially important today because there is no low hanging fruit in the spectrum anymore. It's going to get harder and harder to mine for the spectrum that's needed and so I think a lot of the government agencies whether it's FAA or DOD or NOAA have kind of woken up and now are going to defend their spectrum turf and more than they've done in the past so I think that's an increasing area of the need for greater coordination between the two agencies because obviously there's a balance that has to occur there but I understand NTIA and FCC are negotiating yet a new MOU from 2003 so it looks like it needs to be updated I think and I think that's a great thing. So this raises another question that I wanted to ask because if we read the report there were a bunch of things that we would say today wow, how did you not talk about this and one of these is the interagency coordination issue and as we heard from Meredith Baker NTIA actually did its own report which also was enthusiastic about echoed many of the themes that were in the spectrum task force report but what does it say about how these decisions were being made 20 years ago that the spectrum policy task force didn't really feel they needed to touch on interagency coordination and if we were going to have a spectrum policy task force today how would you want to see that handled would it be inviting in other agencies would it be making them part of a team would it be consultations how would you perhaps want to see that handled differently today anybody want to start? I do think I think they mentioned in the report briefly that he could coordinate with NTIA but NTIA obviously wasn't at the table and I do think that that's really really important because like I said there's no real low hanging fruit in the spectrum anymore so the stuff that's out there is going to be hard to work with and it's going to require coordination and smart technology use so that's something that I think you have to have NTIA at the table and with a strong administrator NTIA hasn't had an administrator now for a couple of years really they've just had an acting so having somebody in that role as a strong administrator I think I think it's important to I don't have a solution to this issue but I just wanted to note something that most of you are already aware of that some of the most serious problems things that didn't work well recently have to do with perhaps a lack of coordination and I'm thinking of the whole C-band issue with these radar based altimeters in airplanes and it just seemed that this should have been worked out before so I'm not the first or the last one to say we need better coordination but I think it's an interesting point to make that the whole receiver issue is interference it's the heart of the spectrum policy is interference and if we can't coordinate interference on adjacent bands we've got a real problem and all I can say is there has to be more than just talk I think there has to be some kind of binding rules that create greater compatibility and allow the spectrum to be repurposed for higher value uses without causing problems and adjacent bands and it is a coordination problem and also a coordination problem also related to interference and receivers is the whole legato, life squared GPS devices which is going on and seems like forever I don't know if that's 20 years but probably not but it feels like it and there it's a very complicated problem to deal with because you have these GPS devices that are not controlled by a system manager like a system operator like a cellular mobile system and there were decisions that were made in terms of what the power would be for GPS that affects the sensitivity of GPS devices to interference there were issues that these GPS devices actually use GPS transmissions which are outside of the band in order to increase the accuracy of their determination of location and these things I don't think were ever coordinated with the FCC and this also brings me to something that perhaps we'll talk about later which is looking forward and Harold is going to ask about this but the whole notion of future looking regulation is something that we really need and you see this that when the decisions are made how do you structure a system there's typically no thought about what the future might look like I mean we know as many people including Yogi Durz that prediction is hard to do especially about the future but I think it's better to try and we could do a little better assuming the world is going to look exactly the way it does today and so one of my hobby courses is that we need a and this is something I've worked on with John Williams he probably deserves credit which is for interference robustness we need a path towards creating incentives for growing robustness of systems to interference over time and having that expectation when equipment is manufactured when systems designs are made that there's going to be perhaps a different interference environment in which they're going to have to operate and you don't have to be a genius to say that probably mobile devices there's going to be more spectrum for mobile devices than with the cellular architecture and so on and that somehow you should be expecting to have such a system adjacent to you and be able to deal with it and you don't now and it leads to lots of problems so let me stop there so another place where I think there is not as much discussion or virtually no discussion in the reports that would be very different today is on the international market and international fora such as the ITU or the regional spectrum conferences part of that I think reflects the world as it was in 2002 where we just didn't pay as much attention to that sort of thing but what do you think would be different today in terms of a discussion of the impact of international and the relationship between first of all how do you all think we thought about it then in 2002 this relationship of the FCC and spectrum policy and international spectrum bodies and standard setting bodies and how do you think it would be different if we were writing the report today anybody want to start there was a lot of talk about I think global harmonization of bands and that sort of thing I think those things still persist I'm not an international expert but I do think that's an issue that we continue to have challenges with and I think somebody mentioned we were the first to have mobile technology the first to do auctions the first to deploy the internet other countries now have woken up and are doing the same and they're demanding use of spectrum as well and a lot of that also impacts the satellite world as well not just mobile so it is really important for the US to be involved in these international bodies and to get their point of view I know right now the ITU for example Doreen Dockman Martin is the US candidate there's a Russian candidate as I understand running for that role and I think it's really important for the standard setting point of view that the US really have a strong position because we stand for things that some of the countries don't I think in terms of openness and efficiency of spectrum use and the like so if we had to do it today I just think it probably should be part of the part of the report in a bigger way than it was back in 2002 so I think at the time the international focus for spectrum was much more on satellite and government spectrum than it was on wireless spectrum the US in this time period more or less had decided it could go it alone so in one of the reasons of PCS spectrum was controversial I don't know if you guys remember this but the FCC had just come through this whole thing at the work, preceding work to make the spectrum available at the World Radio Conference for those who aren't the World Radio Conference to do and I can't tell you which one it was but we went through this whole thing the US went through this whole thing to make it mobile satellite spectrum and then turned around and decided no, no it should be what became personal PCS one of the big workforce bands that are mobile providers and then with 700 the FCC did it again and this was after the spectrum policy task force but the FCC just decided on its own band plan for 700 megahertz and hoped that other countries would follow and some did and some didn't the FCC I think had taken the position that the US was a big enough market that it could do what it thought was right and didn't have to follow the rest of the world follow the rest of the world and the rest of the world would follow them so I had this perhaps not I won't characterize it but my perspective is for the international stuff aside from global harmonization of bands which is important to the price of equipment it is still very unclear to me why with respect to terrestrial services the FCC would worry that much about international spectrum but Evan will tell me why well there is another exception something that I had something development with being able to microphone there is an exception it's not only harmonization of equipment standards which affects the price of equipment but Canada and Mexico are on our borders as you may be well aware and it turned out that getting agreements for harmonization of band plans with Canada and Mexico was hugely important for the amount of spectrum that would be available from the broadcasting center auction so I mean there were TV stations that are along the border and they had been coordinated with American stations and that was fine but when you want to put in a mobile service you have to change all that so else you either they're going to interfere with your mobile devices or your mobile devices are going to interfere with their receivers so we've got a problem and it would foreclose the use of 600 megahertz spectrum for mobile services in a very surprisingly large area and for a surprisingly large number of people so that is something that is important and that's not the kind of stuff that they talk about at work that was all done on a bilateral basis but there was a notion I mean a notion I tried to promote the notion of an American band plan that was from Canada through Mexico that it was all harmonized and we went a long way in terms of achieving that there was a lot of hard work that was done and I think there were really good results so and I'll just know because they're not here but State Department is not an agency that we think of as important in spectrum policy but obviously when we talk about these kind of bilateral negotiations or participation in international state is another player that perhaps we need to be more cognizant of in terms of thinking about spectrum policy and how they fit into the into the game one other glaring how much time do I have by the way because you always write more questions that you can possibly answer oh great I got tons of questions one of the things I want to bring up is time flies when you're having fun but one of the things that I would flag is another place where we didn't really focus on this in the spectrum task force report but was I think we would very much want to focus on it today at least I hope so is the question of social justice and economic justice and how spectrum policy fits in with that the attitude at the time and I say this as somebody who was in the public interest community at the time and working with you know folks who were trying to use unlicensed spectrum to bring connectivity to the neighborhoods in the urban core of it didn't have it into rural tribal communities but we didn't talk about social equity certainly not in the same way that much but in general assumption of well the more spectrums available rising tide will lift all boats it will all work out for everyone what do you we were kind of thinking about that today and I will just have one other thing as an example of where we might think about this today one is the 2.5 gigahertz tribal window which has been an important contributor for many tribes to be able to start building out and deploying their own wireless networks but the other is the debate over the FAA and the c-band 5G deployment which you know as I point out where we landed was essentially lower power and exclusion zones around airports well if you look around airports and you consider in major urban areas who lives in those neighborhoods it tends to be poor people people of color because living near airports is not a lot of fun and it's a continuation of a systemic you know racism that you know wears its head in ways that we cannot even think about but you know that translated to was it meant that for another year people who really need access to the capacities of 5G weren't going to get it and no one was discussing this at all so I mean maybe we ended up in the right place as a solution based on you know all the problems but no one at the time said hey does anybody realize that this is going to have a disproportionate impact on people of color in the urban core who by the way tend to be much more dependent on mobile devices than on fixed broadband although God knows we hope Pied and other programs are going to change that so do you think that this was a blind spot in the just in the way we looked at this in 2002 and if so how would we want to correct that today so as you said even the public interest groups this wasn't this was just kind of the general thought this was true the Clinton administration and doing trade agreements that if you create economic benefits then it will help everyone across the board and I think we just all of us as a country come to realize that the effects are not uniform and that that particular attention may need to be given to economic and social justice matters so another way of thinking about it would be that you create value and one of the reasons I love spectrum policy is that there is so much opportunity for value creation and I don't just mean that in the economic venture capital sense I mean it that spectrum if you can move it to a higher and better use it really can improve the lives of Americans in addition to creating economic value so but if you create additional economic value you can then divert a portion of that value to to some kind of public good and that's I think an example of this but I think not the only example is taking a portion of auction revenues and funding first net taking a portion of auction revenues and having a digital equity fund as the public interest groups have suggested or for E911 or public funding public radio stations and public television stations there are lots of things that could be done but in order to do it you actually have to create the additional value first and then it makes it possible to channel some of that value into a public good yeah I would agree with that and I would say back in that time frame to the focus was more on creating some value through the designated entity program and trying to you know make small businesses minority tribal organizations owners of spectrum and with the idea that they would create business and that would you know that would proliferate you know some of that happened some of it didn't there's a long history behind why some of that didn't work so well but that is still in 309J the communications act there is still a mandate through the FCC to do that and look for opportunities and but I also agree that I think that overall you know I'll just cite a few stats here you know the US wireless industry contributes 475 billion to our economy each year creating 4.7 million jobs so this is more than the economies of Austria, Norway Israel combined and the UAE I know that T-Mobile spends a billion dollars a month on building out its network doing that and creates jobs and opportunities and I'm very proud of the fact too I know as part of the digital discrimination comments you know T-Mobile put in into the record some very good data on where we go we go into neighborhoods that a lot of our competitors don't create jobs to provide stores to provide service and so I'm glad to see the commission you know trigger that proceeding and get some really hard data but I do think you know back in that day it really was more of a focus on getting the spectrum out there into the hands of small businesses, minorities, women own business you know there were things like spectrum 2 which was an idea to actually try to create smaller areas because turned out the spectrum was highly valuable and expensive and maybe small businesses, minorities women owned groups could you know purchase smaller geographic areas of spectrum and that sort of thing and some of those ideas are still out there but that was a big focus back then so I want to provide an additional perspective and this perspective is not one to say to ignore the issues that Harold said or in any way disagree with the ideas that Ruth mentioned about using funds to deal with originalized groups but I just want to step back and just look globally how much mobile communications has contributed to the lives of people throughout the world there are before you had mobile phones most people I think in the world did not have any means of communications and to have a phone in many countries you had to wait 20 years perhaps and mobile phones revolutionized communications throughout the world and really was the case of the technology that lifted all books there were people that had nothing in terms of communications and now they can you know call your relatives in the United States from all over the world places that there was no hope you would ever get a landline and it's just been a boom to many people throughout the world and it's not only created economic growth it's created true welfare you know for all these people that are now able to communicate and then I want to say something about the United States again not diminishing what we haven't done but just looking at what has been achieved smart phones have really led to the diffusion of internet access to many people that wouldn't have it otherwise there's a concern that a portion of the population doesn't have wired access to the internet but they do have access which is something that without having equities affordable mobile services they wouldn't have otherwise and I think that's a big deal I think that has promoted equity and it's important not saying that we could do better one thing just to echo what Evan's saying I do know there's obviously there's a lot of emphasis right now in broadband connectivity and a little bit surprised because I think some of the studies done by Q and others how many people are carrying these things and frankly whether it's the lifeline program or the ACP program the people that are getting access to the internet through this device not through a wired connection but through this thing and a lot of these people are dislocated they're homeless they're disabled veterans this is something that I'm a little bit surprised that the administration isn't taking more notice of there's a big focus on fiber and connectivity to the home but this thing is connecting more people around the globe and in the US and in some cases it's the best connection that people are going to get and I know the other innovation that's come out of it too using spectrum wisely both T-Mobile and Verizon are doing this but the fixed wireless offerings so what we're doing is where we have enough capacity and this tends to be in rural areas and it's always been an issue going back to the day with commission that obviously there are fewer people and rural America and maybe the spectrum isn't being used as much so an innovation that T-Mobile is using fixed wireless technology especially in those rural and ex-urban areas not for broadband I think Meredith didn't say her name but we're the fastest growing broadband provider in the US right now and it's not through wire you know so it is surprising to me that you know more of that isn't being understood because fiber is great but you can't fiber the tractor there are places that fiber is going to take a long long time to get to that wireless will be their hell of a lot sooner so I just want to emphasize that in the legislation infrastructure bill I know my team and others fought very hard for technology neutrality for broadband and there's a good reason for that and that's something that as we roll out billions of dollars you know for fiber I hope that people don't forget about wireless and understand that it can be a great solution in many instances so that's you know one of the things I think we might want to distinguish are what are sometimes thought of as social versus technical programs in this area so when we talk about reallocating auction revenues for social purposes we tend to think of that as more social when we talk about things like trying to develop a bidding credit or even questions about what are you know how much what's the size of a license area and what are you know is that going to include you know significant rural areas or is it going to leave people behind those we tend to think is more technical so in terms of and again I acknowledge everything that folks have said that to some degree the rising tide lifts all boats was successful it did improve lives but also we can do better but you know ask me guys you know kind of thinking about it in terms of you know what you might want to do differently today if you were looking at it do you think that it's really about the social programs that if you were doing the you know at the spectrum task force you might have talked a little bit more about the USF for mobile or you know reallocating spectrum revenue or you know is there a role for these kind of technical you know questions should we you know think about social equities more when we're talking about things like the size of license areas or build out requirements in urban areas as well as in rural areas as we move to a more small cell environment yeah I think that's part of what I think is mandated in the infrastructure legislation and is going to be is the focus of the commission's open proceeding on that and whether there are things that the commission can do and how things are being rolled out services are being rolled out I do think just to look back to in 2002 this was flip phones right largely voice very limited internet access what came after this in terms of we're talking 3G was 4G was the whole app economy didn't exist and that was very transformative I think it created you know in the hands of people very powerful information and access and and I think also some of what's happened is also made the service more affordable and I think affordability access how some of this is deployed is always going to be an issue I think to try to get service into the hands of those who need it most I wonder to more questions but before we do that I want to give anybody in the audience the opportunity to ask any questions of the panel here Lord knows I can go on but so there have been other efforts to create a national spectrum policy I'd say probably the most successful was the PCAST reporting 2012 which although that focused primarily on federal spectrum we have not really as Meredith alluded to we have not really had an effort like the spectrum policy task force that has produced a national spectrum policy certainly not since 2012 and arguably even the PCAST report was more an executive branch effort to try to deal with policy for federal spectrum in the face of increased demand so what first of all kind of thinking through what impact do you think in the longer term the spectrum policy task force report as kind of the biggest effort that we've had to do a purely national spectrum policy what do you think its broader effects were and how they contributed to any of these other efforts and why do you think that it's been so hard to replicate the success of the spectrum policy task force in terms of a purely spectrum focused national policy and is this going to get evident trouble no no because I don't have anything to say about it I think one of the useful things about the spectrum policy task force was that and you know there's a lot of commission policy before and after it's not like you know that was a it's a moment frozen in time but it builds on what came before and a lot of things built on it afterwards is how to get away from the scarcity mentality of spectrum management the one of the important auctions are important I think flexible use policy is actually much more important in terms of allowing spectrum to be used to be removed to different uses to be repurposed when you have a command and control of attitude towards spectrum what you generally have in my experience is a lot of engineers thinking okay what else can we fit in this band oh this will work and this will work and it all works today and what it doesn't do is exactly what Evan said which is anticipate what might happen in the future and when you have that kind of incumbency it can make it very difficult to repurpose spectrum and that's one of the reasons why the economists who came in and reached the value of flexible use and auctions and Evan and John Williams paper on you should be well millions of Evan's papers but all of Evan's papers let us to relate but Evan and John Williams paper in particular about being future oriented and anticipating that your interference environment might change because the adjacent uses might change all that is a way of having a attitude towards spectrum that is how do we make spectrum abundant and that is I think what the PCAST report was one of the themes of the PCAST report I will stop there well I don't really have anything to add I will say on the PCAST report to the CBRS spectrum which is still yet to be fully utilized and there's some issues there with respect to neighboring power limits and that sort of thing I will say some of the issues that come up don't always have to involve the FCC in other words a lot of times there's a lot of interference issues every day for example carriers and different users of spectrum that licensees work out you know either through reducing power or changing out equipment or other things and so you know to the extent that the government can encourage that I think it's harder when you're dealing with the Department of Defense because they are the Department of Defense but I think particularly amongst commercial users that sort of stuff is worked out all the time and it doesn't always necessarily require the FCC to engage so thinking about if we were going to try to put together another spectrum policy task force one of the things that I like to say about the FCC is when I talk to economists they say that spectrum policy is really an economic problem and they think it's an awful shame that lawyers and to some degree technologists have so much influence at the FCC when I talk to engineers they tell me that this is all really a technical problem and they think that it's awful that lawyers and to some degree economists have so much influence I'm a lawyer so I think it works out pretty well looking at the spectrum task force there was an effort to balance not just from all parts of the agency but also to bring in a reasonable balance of different disciplines to address these issues do you think that the FCC today is over balanced in one direction or another if we were going to try to do a new spectrum task force would it end up being dominated by particular disciplines and where do you think that the FCC still has a good set of folks from all of these disciplines and what additional disciplines do you think it might be valuable it's something where we might want to include urban planners or other folks who could contribute a different perspective to building a productive policy task force I'm a lawyer so I'm a little biased and it's going to be having an economist on the panel who's a lawyer too but we don't have an engineer it's a real engineer in the room I do think and when I was at the FCC it was really I think great to have the economist, the engineers, the lawyers in the room talking together and I actually credit Reed Hunt a lot with this because I don't think there were many economists at the FCC until he arrived and he really mandated that we needed to have more economic thinking going into our policymaking at the FCC at the time and so I do think it's really important to have I think lawyers do tend to dominate at the FCC but I do think it's really important to have the thinking of engineers the thinking of economists and others I think I don't know about the urban planning idea maybe Are there any other disciplines that we might be missing in terms of how we is this a problem that now has a sociology type element? Futurists might be a good idea I'll never forget listening to Dale Hatfield as a young attorney he used to teach a class and him talking about and this was before those auctions talking about mobile technology and describing what he thought was coming down the pipe and I remember being just amazed and so if there's a limitation sometimes in the government you tend to only look at what's in front of you and sometimes you're not thinking thinking ahead nobody anticipated in 2002 like the app economy nobody anticipated that mobile technology was going to be your primary entry point to the internet and that that would have all sorts of other ramifications Harold and I were talking about privacy for example nowhere on the radar screen at that time so I don't know if you can hire people who can think to the future but to the extent you can have that futurist thinking inside the agency I think it might lead to some interesting policy developments Would we want to have a panel of science fiction writers do come and talk to the FCC for example So I think that there's still a ton of engineers at the FCC and at NTIA I think both agencies are trying to recruit more engineers and I think that would be helpful and I didn't when I don't take what I said before to mean that I'm denigrating engineers they are the core of the FCC's policymaking they're the licensing agency they do a lot of the licensing but I was remarking on this attention that I saw sometimes between the engineers and the economists I would put in a plug for more GIS trained people when we had Mike Byrne and I'm not about the name of the guy that worked with power Eric you know what we referred to Mike Byrne as the mapping guy he said he was really into what he really was doing was helping with data visualization for policymaking but he was so oversubscribed it was just as soon as people realized the value of maps both for people in the people who were trying to buy a spectrum or comment on proceedings or just see where they had broadband service they the demands on their time were incredible and I think that is something that is just going to become more important over time so last question and I'm going to take one answer off the table which means you know I'm sorry Evan did you want to No I was just saying that we are hiring for GIS for people so last question and I'm going to take an answer off the table before I ask that we need more spectrum is not an acceptable answer for this question other than that what is do you think the biggest policy issue in spectrum today from my perspective I think just the interaction with government users of spectrum is a big deal and the government users of spectrum don't tend to use the most efficient technology we saw that T-Mobile saw that when we cleared the AWS spectrum and you had all these government users, DHS and others using analog spectrum that really wasted a lot of megahertz so I think driving more efficiency in the use of government spectrum and more interaction positive interaction with government on spectrum management I think would be an important development I agree and I must say that I can't help but go where you said not to which is continuing to reallocate spectrum for higher value uses it's not like we get more spectrum it's just we're moving spectrum from either unused or lower value on uses and I think that's critical and as Kathleen has said the FCC is pretty much empty to cover at the moment and we need to look to the government in TIA but in addition to that issue which I think is always the central issue I'll go back to stuff that we've already talked about which is forward looking regulation and the biggest example which we mentioned has to do with interference dealing in a smarter way with interference and let me just note on the interference issue interference is not just about better receivers it's about system design and this is something that John Williams taught me one of the problems with receiver standards besides the fact that it's often too blunt and you don't give enough flexibility but there are tradeoffs in system design that's the best one to talk about it but in terms of being susceptible to interference there are multiple ways that you can address it possibly can increase the power you can increase the average power level throughout the entire service area so that you don't have a problem that you have interference because the desired signal is weak because you're so far away there are other measures that what John and I called self-protection you can have non-mandated frequency cord bands and you can have non-mandated geographic zone setbacks to avoid interference so ideally we would like to provide incentives to let the parties that are receiving interference figure out what the best way to mitigate it is but not to expect that they're always going to be able to coexist with what was when they first got their allocation but to a higher a more challenging interference environment but if they don't do that it's their problem but one of the so interference I think is my number one issue after more spectrum and let me just on interference thing I think John and I have a good idea how we would deal with providing incentives for system operators where they're controlling the whole system design but we don't have a good answer to the question how you would have dealt with GPS or altimeters those are very difficult and at the moment the best we have is some kind of standards minimum requirements something but there isn't a system operator that can be given in the sense that to make that stuff all work and so we don't have a good solution except the sort of traditional standard the most flexible standard that you can have there can be a performance standard not a design standard but that's something I'd like to help on and I have to figure that out so I would just vote for continuing to expand the tool set for re-perfusing spectrum I think that's what CVRS was about the spectrum task force report talks about unlicensed spectrum and exclusive use spectrum the CVRS policies were in effort to be creative and look for something that was in between so that it could be a spectrum of tools so I'd like to see more ideas like that come to the front and be tried at least in some days one other thing I'll just mention too is I think enforcing build out you know making sure people are utilizing the spectrum that's been licensed to them I think is a big issue too the commission very rarely takes spectrum back that isn't being fully utilized and so that is something too that I think the commission could be a little stronger on so I want to thank our panel and ask everyone else here to thank our panel as we had our jump back to the exciting year of 2002 and look ahead to what we ought to be doing 20 years later so thank you all for participating thank you very much